Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "dubiously-plot-relevant"
Now THIS is a Pointlessly Indulgent Race Scene!
I'm reaching the middle point of my current work, Ivar Stormling of Skar. It's entirely dominated by an extended sequence involving the heroes participating (for dubious reasons) in a long and deadly high-speed death race.
This is the first thing I had in mind about the book, in fact: I've had it running through my mind, in one shape or other, for many years now, and you could even say that this entire book is written as an excuse to finally get the damn thing on paper. It all certainly formed around this thing: I thought of the race first, then far more recently started to imagine what got them to this position to begin with, what motivated them to enter it, and where they might go after the fact.
And I'm now coming to the somewhat painful realization that the race, and the plot constructed around it, actually have very little to do with each other.
Like the podracing thing in Star Wars Episode 1, the entire sequence is basically an excuse to make a new friend, then elongated into a superfluous action scene that is mostly there because the author really, really wants to add it in.
I'm rather often guilty of that sort of a thing. Many reviews of my first work, The Straggler's Mask, point out the flaw that a great deal of the book's events could be easily skipped without the story or the plot suffering at all. Since then I've taken some steps to try and curb such tendencies, but it seems it will always be a part of me no matter what I do.
Even as I write this, I'm struggling to find ways to make the sequence more relevant for the plot. There's not a whole lot that I can do to tie it to the main antagonist or his plans, for one. But maybe I'll work to develop the characters during it, let them display new sides of themselves, experience growth, and learn important lessons. I can also take it as an opportunity for them to show off new skills and abilities and equipment, things they could then use to save the day in a more climactic context - a bit of foreshadowing, Chekhov's Guns, so that it wouldn't all come completely out of left field.
But all such procedures are mere bandages on a gaping wound, and can never conceal the fact that, at the end of the day, it is pretty pointless. I could just ditch the whole thing, and scavenge all the actually important moments and put them elsewhere, to save pages and my readers' sanity. But I don't think I will do that, not this time.
So, what should you take out of this? Well, if you really enjoy death races and fast-paced action with little plot to hold it back, then I suppose you could skip the first fourteen chapters of the book to get right into the meat of things. If on the other hand you'd like your story to be tighter, each scene and chapter to actually mean things in the greater context, and were annoyed by how the previous book indulged in a bunch of pointless side tracks, then you might want to skip everything from chapter fifteen up to... twenty? Twenty-one? I'm not sure yet.
Progress on the whole is good: I've written 68k words since the beginning of the year, and if this keeps up I might get the whole thing written as quickly as Demure Sea, perhaps even faster. I doubt it'll come out this year, though. There's a great deal of backlog in between that I'd like to throw out there first.
This is the first thing I had in mind about the book, in fact: I've had it running through my mind, in one shape or other, for many years now, and you could even say that this entire book is written as an excuse to finally get the damn thing on paper. It all certainly formed around this thing: I thought of the race first, then far more recently started to imagine what got them to this position to begin with, what motivated them to enter it, and where they might go after the fact.
And I'm now coming to the somewhat painful realization that the race, and the plot constructed around it, actually have very little to do with each other.
Like the podracing thing in Star Wars Episode 1, the entire sequence is basically an excuse to make a new friend, then elongated into a superfluous action scene that is mostly there because the author really, really wants to add it in.
I'm rather often guilty of that sort of a thing. Many reviews of my first work, The Straggler's Mask, point out the flaw that a great deal of the book's events could be easily skipped without the story or the plot suffering at all. Since then I've taken some steps to try and curb such tendencies, but it seems it will always be a part of me no matter what I do.
Even as I write this, I'm struggling to find ways to make the sequence more relevant for the plot. There's not a whole lot that I can do to tie it to the main antagonist or his plans, for one. But maybe I'll work to develop the characters during it, let them display new sides of themselves, experience growth, and learn important lessons. I can also take it as an opportunity for them to show off new skills and abilities and equipment, things they could then use to save the day in a more climactic context - a bit of foreshadowing, Chekhov's Guns, so that it wouldn't all come completely out of left field.
But all such procedures are mere bandages on a gaping wound, and can never conceal the fact that, at the end of the day, it is pretty pointless. I could just ditch the whole thing, and scavenge all the actually important moments and put them elsewhere, to save pages and my readers' sanity. But I don't think I will do that, not this time.
So, what should you take out of this? Well, if you really enjoy death races and fast-paced action with little plot to hold it back, then I suppose you could skip the first fourteen chapters of the book to get right into the meat of things. If on the other hand you'd like your story to be tighter, each scene and chapter to actually mean things in the greater context, and were annoyed by how the previous book indulged in a bunch of pointless side tracks, then you might want to skip everything from chapter fifteen up to... twenty? Twenty-one? I'm not sure yet.
Progress on the whole is good: I've written 68k words since the beginning of the year, and if this keeps up I might get the whole thing written as quickly as Demure Sea, perhaps even faster. I doubt it'll come out this year, though. There's a great deal of backlog in between that I'd like to throw out there first.
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