Tue 1 Feb 2011
There’s your problem
Posted by PJ under characters, conflict, genre, hortensia, novels, the numberless stars, writing
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The current novel, The Numberless Stars, may be doomed in today’s market. (The story of my life.) I seem to be writing a female POV picaresque fantasy novel, and I don’t believe there’s any tolerance for that sort of thing in today’s instant gratification climate.
Of course, at this stage of the game the novel sucks (it’s a barely there first draft), so perhaps it isn’t a valid test of the viability of the picaresque, fantasy or otherwise. It’s too twee, too infodumpy, too lacking in immediate and identifiable conflict. Maybe the fault, dear Brutus, is not with the genre but with myself, my execution of said genre. A story which wanders hither and yon and uses satire to point out a society’s flaws may indeed have some place in today’s world, but a wandering story which doesn’t engage the reader in some fashion early on is just a badly written novel.
Lord knows my first drafts take way too long to get to the point. I spend enormous amounts of time getting the feel of the characters just so and have an unfortunate tendency to throw it all on the page. My rewrites consist of paring down and refining, taking out gallons of character and tangential lard and boiling it down to make candles. And that’s for the novels that aren’t picaresque. God save me if I actually write a novel where wandering around and having episodic adventures and living by one’s wit is built into the genre.
Because even if the conflict is there on the first page, it’s rather broad and cyclical:
- Hortensia versus the Western Society of her time.
- Hortensia versus her family.
- Hortensia versus deity, leading to transformation.
Then cycling back to:
- Hortensia versus her family, and finally,
- Hortensia versus the Western Society of her time.
God help us all.
