{"id":32262,"date":"2016-05-16T06:30:17","date_gmt":"2016-05-15T18:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=32262"},"modified":"2016-05-15T21:14:56","modified_gmt":"2016-05-15T09:14:56","slug":"all-about-structure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2016\/05\/16\/all-about-structure\/","title":{"rendered":"All About Structure…"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mary<\/a>

Mary Victoria<\/p><\/div>\n

Over the weekend I talked about the author’s dilemma that often arises out of research<\/a>, a train of thought sparked by my recent interview with the insightful Mary Victoria:<\/p>\n

Helen Lowe & Mary Victoria in Conversation<\/a><\/h3>\n

Another aspect of storytelling that Mary and I discussed was how sometimes as author you have to backtrack on earlier material to get your story right. Mary used the adjective “painful” to describe this process and she is quite right, it very often is painful: also frustrating, time consuming, and maddening.<\/p>\n

\"BookSwornthumb.php\"<\/a>

Writing as alchemy…<\/p><\/div>\n

We also agreed that being willing to backtrack and reevaluate almost always results in a better book.<\/p>\n

I took comfort from such reflections this past week as I found myself spending as much time reflecting on as actually writing the current instalment of The Chaos Gate<\/em> (The Wall of Night<\/a> Book Four — & very much a\u00a0 work in progress at this juncture!)<\/p>\n

The holdup was all about structure. I know what I want to achieve with the material, but whether it works or not all depends on how its structured in relation to other aspects of the story. In this case anyway, getting that structure right is all about getting the right words into their right order in the first instance, then relative to other sequences of text in the second.<\/p>\n

\"Heroines<\/a>

New book a-comin’<\/p><\/div>\n

It’s all been a bit of a slog, one that merits all of the adjectives above: painful, frustrating, time consuming and just a wee bit maddening as well.<\/p>\n

There is a gleam of sunshine in there, though, which is that it is also incredibly rewarding—and despite the to-ing and fro-ing, the challenge<\/em> of the storytelling is rather fun as well.<\/p>\n

But for the story to work, make no mistake:\u00a0 at times like these the author absolutely has to get that structure right. If she or he doesn’t then (imho) the whole storytelling house of cards will collapse in on itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the weekend I talked about the author’s dilemma that often arises out of research, a train of thought sparked by my recent interview with the insightful Mary Victoria: Helen Lowe & Mary Victoria in Conversation Another aspect of storytelling that Mary and I discussed was how sometimes as author you have to backtrack on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-my-books","category-about-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32262"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32269,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32262\/revisions\/32269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}