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hrjOk, maybe not as dramatic as all that! One of the things I like about writing highly structured poetry, as opposed to free verse, is the challenge of using that structure to do things in addition to simply communicating the images. Especially when I can use the structure in ways that fly under the radar of the obvious.
In the first Alpennia book, the structure of strictly alternating points of view emerged naturally. I wanted to show how the events unfolded from both Margerit and Barbara's points of view and it only made sense to do it in alternate chapters. There were a few occasions where the combination of a strictly alternating point of view and a strictly chronological progression of chapters meant I had to choose between very short chapters or what seemed like the more natural POV, but in general I simply took it as a challenge of the chosen structure.
I made the choice in The Mystic Marriage to retain not only the alternation of points of view, but to tell a broader story by keeping Margerit and Barbara's POVs as well as focusing on Antuniet's and Jeanne's. It was a bit more of a challenge, especially when I chose to stick with a strict rotation system. There have been a couple of reviews that felt that I either had too many POVs or that I focused to heavily on certain ones. The former is a reasonable reaction, although I stand by my choice. The latter is interesting, given that all four characters received essentially equivalent page time, both in chapter-count and word-count. And I'm not entirely certain how many readers noticed or cared about the why of the organization.
I knew that eventually one or more of the above structures would need to be modified or abandoned. I couldn't simply continue adding another pair of viewpoint characters to the existing set, even though all the characters would continue to be present and important in some way to the story. When I first drew up the chapter-by-chapter outline for Mother of Souls I worked by the basic principle that my two new characters (Serafina and Luzie) would each get one quarter of the chapters in a strict alternation (i.e., Luzie gets chapters 1, 5, 9, etc. while Serafina gets 3, 7, 11, etc.) with the even-numbered chapters being alternated in a not-as-strict but still even-handed manner between the four pre-existing characters.
Very shortly after I actually started writing, I concluded that this wouldn't work. A viewpoint character needs a certain threshold of page-time or the readers won't have any reason to be invested. And when I looked over the distribution of chapters and events, I was somewhat dismayed to find that Antuniet was the POV that could most easily be eliminated. There were no events that both needed to be presented in real-time and for which she was the only viewpoint character present. So I rearranged a few events and gave most of her chapters to Jeanne and moved on.
But in the last week or so I've come to another fracture in the structure as originally designed. You see, Chapter 21 was supposed to be Luzie's chapter, according to the plan. But the plot notes for that chapter have remained stubbornly confined to, "I need to figure out what happens in this chapter." The closer I got to writing that chapter (and I'm in the middle of chapter 20 at the moment) the more I realized that there was nothing of any significance or importance that needed to be written about between Chapter 20 (Jeanne's POV, Jeanne & Antuniet return from the summer trip to Prague in time to witness the penultimate hurdle for the opening of Margerit's college) and Chapter 22 (Margerit's POV, all hell breaks loose when the college opens, the social season begins, an unexpected visitor shows up on her doorstep, and just about everything that can go wrong does).
So Chapter 21 is going to be cut. And the chances are, nobody but me would notice that this means there's a hiccup in the formal meter of the verse. And -- my love of form notwithstanding -- it would be a worse violation of structure to include an unnecessary chapter literally "just for form's sake". But I still feel like I've failed somehow. As if all those other times when I've gotten creative about how the events were laid out and experienced in order to maintain the meter could have been solved the easy way instead by breaking my own, purely arbitrary, rules. *sigh* I will survive.
In the first Alpennia book, the structure of strictly alternating points of view emerged naturally. I wanted to show how the events unfolded from both Margerit and Barbara's points of view and it only made sense to do it in alternate chapters. There were a few occasions where the combination of a strictly alternating point of view and a strictly chronological progression of chapters meant I had to choose between very short chapters or what seemed like the more natural POV, but in general I simply took it as a challenge of the chosen structure.
I made the choice in The Mystic Marriage to retain not only the alternation of points of view, but to tell a broader story by keeping Margerit and Barbara's POVs as well as focusing on Antuniet's and Jeanne's. It was a bit more of a challenge, especially when I chose to stick with a strict rotation system. There have been a couple of reviews that felt that I either had too many POVs or that I focused to heavily on certain ones. The former is a reasonable reaction, although I stand by my choice. The latter is interesting, given that all four characters received essentially equivalent page time, both in chapter-count and word-count. And I'm not entirely certain how many readers noticed or cared about the why of the organization.
I knew that eventually one or more of the above structures would need to be modified or abandoned. I couldn't simply continue adding another pair of viewpoint characters to the existing set, even though all the characters would continue to be present and important in some way to the story. When I first drew up the chapter-by-chapter outline for Mother of Souls I worked by the basic principle that my two new characters (Serafina and Luzie) would each get one quarter of the chapters in a strict alternation (i.e., Luzie gets chapters 1, 5, 9, etc. while Serafina gets 3, 7, 11, etc.) with the even-numbered chapters being alternated in a not-as-strict but still even-handed manner between the four pre-existing characters.
Very shortly after I actually started writing, I concluded that this wouldn't work. A viewpoint character needs a certain threshold of page-time or the readers won't have any reason to be invested. And when I looked over the distribution of chapters and events, I was somewhat dismayed to find that Antuniet was the POV that could most easily be eliminated. There were no events that both needed to be presented in real-time and for which she was the only viewpoint character present. So I rearranged a few events and gave most of her chapters to Jeanne and moved on.
But in the last week or so I've come to another fracture in the structure as originally designed. You see, Chapter 21 was supposed to be Luzie's chapter, according to the plan. But the plot notes for that chapter have remained stubbornly confined to, "I need to figure out what happens in this chapter." The closer I got to writing that chapter (and I'm in the middle of chapter 20 at the moment) the more I realized that there was nothing of any significance or importance that needed to be written about between Chapter 20 (Jeanne's POV, Jeanne & Antuniet return from the summer trip to Prague in time to witness the penultimate hurdle for the opening of Margerit's college) and Chapter 22 (Margerit's POV, all hell breaks loose when the college opens, the social season begins, an unexpected visitor shows up on her doorstep, and just about everything that can go wrong does).
So Chapter 21 is going to be cut. And the chances are, nobody but me would notice that this means there's a hiccup in the formal meter of the verse. And -- my love of form notwithstanding -- it would be a worse violation of structure to include an unnecessary chapter literally "just for form's sake". But I still feel like I've failed somehow. As if all those other times when I've gotten creative about how the events were laid out and experienced in order to maintain the meter could have been solved the easy way instead by breaking my own, purely arbitrary, rules. *sigh* I will survive.
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Date: 2015-11-18 04:35 pm (UTC)Just a random thought from a reader who totally appreciates getting this glimpse inside the world of a writer during the writing process.
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Date: 2015-11-18 11:02 pm (UTC)