{"id":1666,"date":"2012-07-30T18:01:09","date_gmt":"2012-07-30T22:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/?p=1666"},"modified":"2012-07-30T18:02:31","modified_gmt":"2012-07-30T22:02:31","slug":"what-lies-beneath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/30\/what-lies-beneath\/","title":{"rendered":"What Lies Beneath"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Work on the ‘Mindbenders’ sequel is proceeding. I’m almost at the end of a good draft; the next several should proceed much more quickly (fingers crossed).<\/p>\n

I’m not an orderly storyteller. Stories come out of my subconscious in episodes and scenes. I usually start with a flash, a place or outrageous image and I have to find out what it means, how it works. My first few attempts at a scene are usually diversions, brainless heartless or gutless substitutes the conscious mind substitutes for the original vision . It usually takes a bunch of writing to get past that, to find my way back to some approximation of that sweet first flash.<\/p>\n

But it’s only after months of wrestling with a story as a whole – I generally don’t get to the end until I’ve flogged the beginning and middle to death – that I start picking up the larger, deeper, wider meaning underneath.<\/p>\n

Usually, I’ll be twenty or thirty pages from the end of a draft and I’ll write something (again, I try to let the words hit the page before I’ve thought them through) that just explodes in my head. And then I have to do another draft just to weave that theme throughout the story, to make sure it’s everywhere \u00a0without hitting anyone over the head.<\/p>\n

Seeing the theme in your story is\u00a0like switching from a close-up of a face to an overhead shot of a neighborhood: everything suddenly appears in a much wider context. And if I’ve done it right, all kinds of details that I thought I put in on a whim turn out to have a distinct purpose. The whole story resonates on a deeper level.<\/p>\n

This is another reason you can’t write too quickly. Early drafts of a story inevitably focus on plot and character mechanics. I once laughed at a post by F. Paul Wilson, who detailed the stages he went through \u00a0writing what he considered his plot-driven stories; they were entirely the same as the stages\u00a0of what I consider my character-driven ones. But theme doesn’t emerge until you’ve been working long enough for the whole story to simmer under the surface for a while.<\/p>\n

So, as I’ve said before, if you’re writing six books a year, you’re not doing your readers or your characters any favors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Work on the ‘Mindbenders’ sequel is proceeding. I’m almost at the end of a good draft; the next several should proceed much more quickly (fingers crossed). I’m not an orderly storyteller. Stories come out of my subconscious in episodes and …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[34,30,254,162,8],"class_list":["post-1666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-writing","tag-art","tag-characters","tag-e-books","tag-theme","tag-writing-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t