by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Between now and New Year’s Day, I’m going to try to just distract myself rather than throwing myself back into writing. They say once you finish a first draft, you need to chill out for about a month so when you start working on the second draft, you come at the project with fresh eyes.
This is not going to stop me, however, from bouncing around the other books in the series while I wait to write again. One thing that is going to both be a serious pain in the ass to keep consistent and yet will also really make for a far more compelling character is the use of a foreign language occasionally in certain scenes.
I hope to use this foreign language so much — and so consistently — that I may have to have a small list of the foreign words used at the very beginning of the novel (along with a map or two) so readers won’t get frustrated or confused as to what the fuck is going on. But the use of this foreign language on an incidental basis is crucial to what happens later on in the series.
In fiction, at least, things can’t just randomly happen. You have to lay out your cause and effect in a very clear manner so when some big event happens, it doesn’t blindside your audience. As such, I’m really going to make it absolutely clear that my Heroine –and her son — have a direct connection to another country and culture so when the time comes it will obviously make sense that such a thing would happen.
The fact that I have gone backwards in time to show the audience exactly how we ended up with such a strange little Southern town in novels set in the modern day has really helped a great deal. I’m also digging very, very deep into my personal history to tell these five stories, to the point that if you read them all you will know an embarrassing amount about me on a personal basis.
But they say you have to bleed onto the page to be successful, so keep the faith.
You must be logged in to post a comment.