tackling t'opus

Taking Laz's advice, I'm now going to write down the entire plot of t'HP opus from alpha to omega, on little bits of paper, and then I can shuffle them around if one sequence doesn't work. There's also the chronology of the events (the fabula) and the chronology of the actual fic, flashbacks and all (the syuzhet) plus there is the chronology of my writing of these things, because I'm not an alpha-to-omega writer, my writing goes more like 'alpha-epsilon-mu-beta-gamma-omicron', and I'm not even quite up to omega yet, although almost. (omg, omegon, omegod -- sorry, I digress)

I don't know whether there is a narratological term for this last chronology. As I've said often, the narratologists are fixed on the text (so they have terms for every conceivable aspect thereof) and on the reader, so there's a concept of the time-of-reading (Erzählzeit) but not the concept of the time-of-writing because the narratologists have neglected us authors.

I know some of you write from alpha to omega, and some of you write higgledy-piggledy, and some of you write all the sex scenes first, and some of you leave them to last and torment yourselves over them. But at some point in the game you have to come clean and do the alpha-to-omega thing, and how do people do that? When do you do the chest-out, bum-in thing, take a deep breath and go through from beginning to end?

I've also set up a locked customised thingy for those who are my sort-of-betas (Laz, Cal, Natashachen, and Res just because she once kindly read the first tentative attempts and said interesting things about how she uses her betas). I haven't got a real beta for this but I've shown this handful of people bits of the manuscript and fragments of this and that and bored their ears off with ramblings. Except I'm so diffident I always only dare ramble for 4 minutes at a stretch. I find it also helps clear my thoughts to put these ramblings down in a post. LJ is funny like that: posting something, even locked, is somehow more public and appears to achieve more in my head and galvanise me more than if I write it down on a piece of paper. Maybe that's why people have started locked thesis communities.

And that's what I'll also do: I'll motivate myself by posting daily word counts of my book! Argh. Now there's a very scary thought.

But anyone else who feels like they want to discuss Draco, Dudley, Harry and Petunia, also Piers and little Mark Evans and Hermione and muggles, with me: feel free! I love it!

fabula vs syuzhet

In my last post, I mentioned fabula and syuzhet, so now I'm going off on a tangent on this subject. These things are also called story vs plot; I prefer the Russian words because they sound so wonderful and exotic, and also because the English words can be confused with more everyday usages of the word 'story' but here are my problems regarding these.

Fabula (story) refers to the story events as they happen in chronological order.

Syuzhet (plot) refers to the events as they are presented in the actual text, i.e. in the fic. So in the 'story', a may happen and then b happens and then c, but in the actual 'plot' you are thrown in medias res with event c, and then there's a flashback to b, and maybe you don't find out a until the very end in another memory or flashback (or some other form of analepsis).

Nearly all of my fics so far have been fairly chronological. I didn't scramble story events massively, and only had the odd flashback. I didn't withhold events from readers until readers. Story and plot were more or less homologous.

But in this HP opus there is much more scrambling of events. And one of my difficulties is figuring out when to reveal any of the events to the reader and when to another character in the fic. Say that event x happened to Dudley at point y in his life. Do I tell the reader straight off? Do I tell a reader a little way into the fic, and if so, when? And when the hell do I allow Dudley to tell Draco?

I realise that I had this a bit in Desert Prince, but in DP I know the plot very well. And I've realised that it's much easier writing a complex plot with analepses if the narrator is first person. Because a first-person narrator is automatically an external narrator and a narrator who knows much more than the first-person character. Because Orli who tells the DP story in first person is telling it all, of course, in retrospect; he knows things at the time of narrating that he didn't know at the time when they were happening, so there's a whole lot of 'but I was young then and didn't know better' and 'little did I know what would come of this later'. It's like an in-built plot and tension generator.

HP doesn't have this one single pov. I'm trying my hand at Bakhtinian poly-dialogue and it's hard! It's very hard for me, and it's also hard fanfic-wise because it's not a mode much favouried in fanfic so there are few models to emulate. Most fanfics are restricted to one pov, or they are experimental, and I am also finding it very difficult not being experimental.

Anyway, the whole syuzhet/fabula/my own writing time is doing my head in.

I need to write my fabula events down on little pieces of paper now and stop rambling into LJ!!!!

daily word count

400 today.