Re: How do you age your characters?


<andycox500@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1182184933.382610.53910@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi Folks

This is my 1st novel and I've set up a blog page 'http://
theultimateprice.blogspot.com' and my question which is simply, its
the answer / solution I'm struggling with....I'm trying to age my 2
main characters from children to late teens in one chapter and
struggling....My idea was to flashback to significant events in the
tiemline but I'm not sure that works. Does anyone have experience
where this was done succcessfully as I'm the first to admit it, my
chapter 14 just isn't happening!

The first step to solving any writing problem is nearly always correct
diagnosis. In this case, that means figuring out *why* you are having
trouble with Chapter 14. "I don't do bland" isn't good enough; if that were
the whole problem, you could jazz the chapter up with some ninjas or a
purple monkey or a sudden emotional crisis, whatever works for you, and
Bob's your uncle.

In this case, it seems to me there are a couple of possibilities. You may
have taken a wrong plot-turn some time back, or be about to take one, and
your backbrain is objecting by going on strike. This is quite common; the
good news is, it means you have a backbrain you can trust to keep yourself
from going too far in a direction that will end up making a total mess of
the book. The bad news is, it means you'll have to stop and spend some time
figuring out where and how things went wrong, and how to get them back on
track. When I was writing my first novel, I did this, and I ended up having
to ditch seven chapters so I could go back to a major decision point and
have my heroine say "No, not today, sorry" instead of "Yeah, sure, let's
go!" But that was a pretty severe case.

A related possibility is that there is something wrong with this
structure -- thirteen chapters of childhood, one chapter covering the next
six to ten years, X-many more chapters of late-teenagerhood. Possibly you
started in the wrong place ("wrong" in this context being defined as
"anything that makes your backbrain go on strike"). Possibly what you have
isn't a single, chronologically connected narrative, but the sort of story
that gets told in sections, with breaks between). Possibly this is a story
that ought not to be told chronologically at all.

Another possibility is that you have reached a point in the story where your
original notions of where the story was going and what you expect to have
happen in it -- in the whole rest of the story, not just in Chapter 14 --
need to be rethought. In that case, no amount of plugging along forward is
going to help until you do the rethinking. You may also have reached a
point where you don't yet have the skills to pull of what you want to do,
the way you want to do it; the fix there is to figure out what skills you
need, and then go learn them (or learn by doing, over and over, until you
get it the way you want it).

And it's always possible that you've just hit a low spot. No job, writing
included, is 100% fun, 24/7 -- there always seems to be something that an
individual writer just doesn't like doing. Possibly a compressed summary of
however-many years is high on your "I hate doing this" list.

I am a bit concerned by your description, however. 13 chapters of
childhood, one chapter summarizing seven to ten years of growing up, 10 or
15 or 20 chapters of late-teenagerhood ... it's an extremely uncommon
structure. Furthermore, depending on your chapter lengths, Chapter 14 is
usually either the end of the beginning, the mid-book crisis, or the
beginning of the climax -- and a sudden change in tempo like cramming seven
to ten years into a single chapter just doesn't seem to me to fit well in
any of those positions. If you need to do it, you need to do it...but *why*
do you need to do it? Writing advice isn't one-size-fits all, and I don't
know that your problem is quite the technical one you think it is. So I'd
like to be sure what you need to know, before I start spouting off.

Patricia C. Wrede


.

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