A. In fiction, because you are
making up things that don’t really exist, the hardest part is keeping the
timeline straight, being consistent with your characters and making sure that
what you write is believable enough that it could happen the way you said it
did. (Exception noted for science
fiction.)
For example, I have gone back
to review chapters I wrote previously and realized that a person couldn’t know
something I said he knew because it hadn’t happened yet. That happens a lot
when you rearrange sections during an edit. For that reason, I’ve started
keeping calendars of events and writing a chronology of what happened and when.
I once found that one of my
characters had two different first names—one early in the book and one a few
chapters later. In my defense, I wrote those chapters months apart. To avoid
that, I’ll sometimes insert a place holder where the character goes, write his
or her description separately and blend it into the book later.
In one book, I discovered that
I had two people going to work on a specific date in June 2004 when, in fact,
that date was a Sunday and neither of them would have gone to their jobs on
that day. I had to search the manuscript and change the date throughout.
In the same book, I gave a
character the wrong last name. Hey, it happens.
Next: What’s the easiest part of writing
a novel?
No comments:
Post a Comment