A long-time favorite author of mine did something with her two most recent novels that I find very interesting. She is an Urban Fantasy writer, so it is perfectly understandable that she has brought time-travel into her series. I am, however, questioning her reasoning.
She has a great bunch of characters and has created a multidimensional fictional world which gives her, in my opinion, unlimited options for plot lines. While I'm not against the fun problems and confusion that an alternate time-line can add to a story, she had chosen to go back and "undo" previously permanent changes in the lives of her characters. To me this says that she didn't like the turns her books had taken, or the place her characters ended up in, and created for herself an opportunity to go back and do it a different way.
I see this is as a kind of cheating. If she can fix irreparable damage to certain relationships and have characters that were previously killed off brought back to life, it removes much of the tension from the story. If nothing is permanent, if what her characters have done or experienced can be changed, where is the emotional involvement for the reader?
So while I think this is an option to consider if one needs to make a drastic change to something undo-able that has occurred in a previous book, there should be limits. There needs to be clearly established rules within the story as to what can and can't happen, how and why certain things can or can't occur (like whenever it's convenient for the author), so that the reader's emotional investment in the welfare of the characters doesn't fade.
www.jennifermballard.com
www.daylightsend.weebly.com
www.trustindarkness.com
Showing posts with label Series Novels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Series Novels. Show all posts
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Another Lesson On What (Possibly) Not To Do
My goal for 2011 was to epublish my first book by the end of the year, a deadline I missed by a couple of hours. (Never mind that it was New Year's weekend and my novel wasn't processed and available to download until the following Tuesday). Still, my novel, Daylight's End, is now available on Nook and Kindle and I have already sold a few copies.
Daylight's End is the first in the Daylight Series and I am now working on revising book two, Before Daylight. In earlier posts I've mentioned my difficulties in writing both books, having used a different process for each and still not having established one that works well for me.
I was anxious to get book one out so I can get book two out and I'm anxious to get book two done so I can get to books three and four. This is probably normal for any writer working on a series of books, but my motivation may be a little different.
Here's where we come to something I might recommend not doing. While writing books one and two (and the start of three and the outline for book four), I wrote several - over a dozen - of what I call the Daylight Stories. These are stories featuring the characters, settings and other aspects of the books. I feel like most of them are really good and lots of fun and I have already epublished a few. (See daylightsend.weebly.com) The problem is most of these stories I have not yet published because they involve characters that are not introduced until books three and four and so I feel I can't publish those stories until book three and four are finished and available.
This might be unreasonable on my part and I may decide to publish a couple more stories before books three and four are out. Otherwise, I have several great (my opinion) stories that I can't share yet, even though they are ready. But that's only part of the problem.
The other part is that I'm having difficulty, while working on the novels, remembering that some of the things that I know happen in the stories have not happened yet in the books. It's possible, even likely, that other writers don't have the mental organizational deficiencies that I do, so a situation like this might not be a problem for them.
These two issues don't make me wish I hadn't written those stories when I did, but they are something to think about - and share. In spite of the difficulties they cause me, there was a huge benefit to writing those stories that I will share in a future post.
www.jennifermballard.com
www.daylightsend.weebly.com
www.trustindarkness.weebly.com
Daylight's End is the first in the Daylight Series and I am now working on revising book two, Before Daylight. In earlier posts I've mentioned my difficulties in writing both books, having used a different process for each and still not having established one that works well for me.
I was anxious to get book one out so I can get book two out and I'm anxious to get book two done so I can get to books three and four. This is probably normal for any writer working on a series of books, but my motivation may be a little different.
Here's where we come to something I might recommend not doing. While writing books one and two (and the start of three and the outline for book four), I wrote several - over a dozen - of what I call the Daylight Stories. These are stories featuring the characters, settings and other aspects of the books. I feel like most of them are really good and lots of fun and I have already epublished a few. (See daylightsend.weebly.com) The problem is most of these stories I have not yet published because they involve characters that are not introduced until books three and four and so I feel I can't publish those stories until book three and four are finished and available.
This might be unreasonable on my part and I may decide to publish a couple more stories before books three and four are out. Otherwise, I have several great (my opinion) stories that I can't share yet, even though they are ready. But that's only part of the problem.
The other part is that I'm having difficulty, while working on the novels, remembering that some of the things that I know happen in the stories have not happened yet in the books. It's possible, even likely, that other writers don't have the mental organizational deficiencies that I do, so a situation like this might not be a problem for them.
These two issues don't make me wish I hadn't written those stories when I did, but they are something to think about - and share. In spite of the difficulties they cause me, there was a huge benefit to writing those stories that I will share in a future post.
www.jennifermballard.com
www.daylightsend.weebly.com
www.trustindarkness.weebly.com
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