Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2010-10-15 01:58 am
edenfalling) wrote2010-10-15 01:58 am
Entry tags:
wherein Liz beats her head against the joint history of Archenland and Calormen
Tonight I picked away at ch. 5 of "The Courting Dance," which has been stalled out for several months on account of, well, history infodumping. I had to put the history lesson in sooner or later, and Corin seems to have gotten the short end of the stick -- he gets to explain it all to Cor.
It is really frustrating to compress everything and try to make it sound vaguely like a plausible conversation. At the moment, it's not especially realistic -- the paragraphs are too long, with not nearly enough back-and-forth or background scene-setting stuff going on to ground the dialogue. But!
1. I have successfully plowed through the Archenlandish civil war, the settling of Telmar (and associated Calormene invasion of Archenland -- I love coming up with explanations for stupid things Lewis put in his timeline *grin*), and some culture clash stuff.
2. I have also managed to interlock "The Courting Dance" with "The Corners of the World" -- my unfinished story of how Jadis got from the end of MN to invading Narnia around the year 900 -- which makes my world-building heart absurdly happy. *bigger grin*
3. This means I've reached the interesting parts, which deal with the Long Winter, pirates, banking, differing cultural definitions of honor, the slave trade, and economic crises. *biggest grin*
And once this chapter is finally done, I can get back to the romantic "comedy" aspects, which will hopefully go faster. \o/
(950 words and counting -- since chapter lengths vary from 1,100 words to 1,800, I probably have... 600-700 more to go? *crosses fingers*)
It is really frustrating to compress everything and try to make it sound vaguely like a plausible conversation. At the moment, it's not especially realistic -- the paragraphs are too long, with not nearly enough back-and-forth or background scene-setting stuff going on to ground the dialogue. But!
1. I have successfully plowed through the Archenlandish civil war, the settling of Telmar (and associated Calormene invasion of Archenland -- I love coming up with explanations for stupid things Lewis put in his timeline *grin*), and some culture clash stuff.
2. I have also managed to interlock "The Courting Dance" with "The Corners of the World" -- my unfinished story of how Jadis got from the end of MN to invading Narnia around the year 900 -- which makes my world-building heart absurdly happy. *bigger grin*
3. This means I've reached the interesting parts, which deal with the Long Winter, pirates, banking, differing cultural definitions of honor, the slave trade, and economic crises. *biggest grin*
And once this chapter is finally done, I can get back to the romantic "comedy" aspects, which will hopefully go faster. \o/
(950 words and counting -- since chapter lengths vary from 1,100 words to 1,800, I probably have... 600-700 more to go? *crosses fingers*)
no subject
Heinlein once described how he spent several days (long before home computers) working out by hand the mathematics involved in an orbital rendezvous -- and then that work disappeared into one sentence of a single chapter of the final book. The background determined what he could do, as an author, in that scene... but describing it in the scene itself would have killed the scene.
Your Narnian history may be key to the setup of your story, but unless it's also key to its resolution, it should get a few sentences, no more. (That's what author's notes are for, after all.)
My two centimes.
no subject
It just happens that the mutual history of Archenland and Calormen IS relevant to the plot and its resolution, because that history produced the antipathy that's getting in the way of Cor marrying Aravis. He needs to understand the background before he can successfully state his case without tripping over different interpretations of the same events. So this chapter is kind of a trial run, wherein Cor and Corin work toward understanding each other's point of view -- which requires me to make clear what those viewpoints are and how they came to be.