Dilemma!
December 22, 2007I’ve finally started to write in my book again, but I’ve come up against a sticky problem. A lot of the prose seems dead and pointless, like I’m just going through the motions, and normally I’d be fine with that because this is a first draft after all. But I’m concerned that if I keep writing bland pages, I’ll either get frustrated and give up, or I will come to accept bland pages as acceptable even during the edit process because I can’t see any way to spice them up.
So I’m considering rewriting what I’ve got so far with the present-tense, to see if that helps things. The present tense is nice because it naturally lends itself to active sentences, and if used well can be very fun to read.
The problem is that I was already planning to use the present tense as a way to distinguish a dream sequence that will be coming up in a few chapters. I thought it would be nice to use it as a way to cue the reader in to the fact that the events of that scene take place outside of the regular timeline in a dream. But if the whole book is written in present tense, then I lose that. I suppose I could just make the dream sequence past-tense, but I don’t think the contrast would work as well that way.
Recently I was stuck on a project and came up with the notion of writing all the exciting and dramatic scenes first and then linking them together later. That way I was able to concentrate on scenes that interested and involved me plus built up my confidence for the worthiness of the project as a whole. The linking process wasn’t as terrible as I’d imagined (after all, I had a central concept to build around) and tomorrow I hand over the finished result–a 162 page novella/ short novel–to my wife and first editor for her critique.
Hope this is helpful to you in re-firing your interest in your project…