One real chapter and two mushballs slowly taking shape. I’ll git ’em. One page at a time.
\nI’m having a problem introducing characters. On one hand, I can’t introduce backstory on 10-15 characters in the first chapter, because then no action will happen. On the other, I’m finding myself writing badly when a new character enters, like:<\/p>\n
Our cousin Bob came through the doorway. Oh crap, you don’t know who Bob is, you don’t care about him. Uh. Uh. Bob was an elephant hunter. Bob was 42 and a Lysol addict. Bob was tall. Once he bumped his head on a door. Yada Yada WAY TOO MUCH BACKSTORY ABOUT BOB.<\/p>\n
Bob finished coming through the doorway. God that took forever.<\/p>\n
Bob sat down next to me, tall-ly. “Got any Lysol?” SEE SEE I HAD TO TELL YOU THAT, NOW YOU GET IT.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So, yeah, that’s not very good reading. I think the answer is to drop a clue as to their existence before their entrance, then dial back the exposition and fill it in as actual action happens. And substitute backstory with action, too.<\/p>\n
I don’t actually know what I’m doing, folks, I’ve never written a story longer than 6,000 words, and now I’m going for over ten times that. You’re watching me fake my way through it. Whee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One real chapter and two mushballs slowly taking shape. I’ll git ’em. One page at a time. I’m having a problem introducing characters. On one hand, I can’t introduce backstory on 10-15 characters in the first chapter, because then no action will happen. On the other, I’m finding myself writing badly when a new character […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[804],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-el-laberinto-the-writing-process"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/littlemornings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/littlemornings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/littlemornings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/littlemornings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/littlemornings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/littlemornings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/littlemornings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/littlemornings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/littlemornings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}