Daily Archives: July 22, 2010

Hmmm Not as finished as I thought I was

So I was doing more ink-on-paper edits to Cawdor and continued making a mental list scenes required the establish things I used int he payoff at the end of the book. Originally I had figured I needed three or so scenes to plug my narrative holes. (a Narrative hole in my terminology is quite different from a plot hole. A plot hole is a problem that if not resolved destroys the structure of the story. For example is the floating mountains in AVATAR are floating because they are dense with unobtainium, why aren’t the terrans just grabbing these floating mountains and boosting them to orbit? A Narrative hole is a missing scenes that helps fully explain the events or motivations of the characters, but the logic of the story is still sound.)

Anyway I though maybe another 2-3 thousands words to fill in the narrative holes. Today I wrote down my list of scenes and found it was 11 scenes long. (Mainly because a background character stepped up to increase the tension and now she has to be back established to fulfill that function.) Now I figure I may need anywhere from 10 to 15 thousand words to properly full out this story.

I have the room, the manuscript was on the small side and the story will be stronger for it, but *sigh* there are miles to go before I sleep.

Share