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Zot spot

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So just die, already


TheZot

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It's a grey and drizzly saturday, and I'm sitting here rewriting this goddamn fight scene. Again. This is its third go-round, and it's pissing me off. This is S&S stuff. It's supposed to be straightforward, "kill the monster, take its treasure, move on." I mean, there's formula. Possibly sacred formula, I'm not sure -- the genre both demands it and is antithetical to it, which might make it obligatory to acknowledge and ignore it -- but definitely formula. You'd think it was easy to follow, but noooo... I apparently insist on making things rather more complex than they need to be.

 

 

Bah. I'm tempted to rip the whole damn thing out and replace it with some boinking, except I'm a little worried what'll happen if I do that.

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Maybe you don't really want to kill the monster and take its treasure, after all. Maybe you don't even want to be in the same place with the monster. Or maybe the monster isn't the monster. Or the treasure isn't the treasure.

 

If a scene is really resistant to beign written, there's a possibility that it really doesn't want to be written. Or sometimes, maybe it's a scene before that that doesn't want to be writtern, at least the way it is being written.

 

(I've been convinced by my writing group to change an entire first-person narrative, the whole novel worth, into third person, and to change some of the chronology. They want me to kill off a lot more bystanders, or hurt them seriously, and I went all around the landscape looking to do that, but now I'm changing some of the lethal events back to non-lethal ones because I realized that the way I had done it the threat level wasn't increasing as it should. To try to keep from producing gibberish, I am retyping every single word rather than cutting-and-pasting and replacing the pronouns. This means that the writing is changing more than I planned on. The other effect of this is that I've noticed much more starkly how certain things keep happening over and over again, so I'm looking at those things to see if they need to do that, and whether there's anything to be gained by stacking those repetitions like that, or anything to be gained by tearing them out and replacing them with something else)

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The problem's not that the scene's resistant to writing; it writes just fine, and comes out perfectly good. The problem's that the resulting scene is for a different bloody story. (Right, maybe not bloody, as it's a fight with a demon, but "ichory" doesn't have the same ring to it)

 

My own fault, the story needs subtle, and unfortunately my idea of subtle's normally "only hit it over the head with a stick once"...

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