The mess in the middle

[ksmith]

You'd think that after spending a large chunk of the day working over the book that I'd have at least finished one damned scene. But it's a Jani-John scene and things need to be stated just so. I've rewritten some of this dialogue 4-5 times over the past week. Fingers crossed that I finally have it, at least to the point that I can move on to the Jani-Lucien scene that follows, the wonder of which will be that Lucien agrees with something John said.

Allergies still giving me hell. What a pain.

UPDATE: and I have finally finished the frappin' scene. A shade over 14 pages long, with about 4 added today...give or take all the stuff I cut/trimmed/erased/trashed. Not completely happy with it, but it will serve for now.

I feel uncomfortable about the length of this scene--it's almost an entire chapter in and of itself.

Survey question for writers--about how long would you say your average scene is? # of words or pages--either is fine.

Another question--how many pages do your chapters usually run?

Way back when I was first working on CODE, back when it was still GLASS GREEN, a first reader commented that my scenes were too long. At the time, they were running into double-digits, pagewise, and I worked to shorten them. Now I start to feel edgy if I have scenes that run more than 10 pages. Unfortunately, this book is making me edgier than hell.

FYI, I consider a scene any stretch of writing where the same characters start and end in the same general space. This current scene begins and ends in the library, with no new characters showing up over the course of the thing to break up matters.

It bothers me.

Comments

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Question the second--how many pages do your chapters run?

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Well, many of my books don't have chapters. The Jenny books, for example, only have scene breaks.

They're "heavy" scene breaks, though--they come with an in-character timestamp--so they might count as like, chapters-lite.

The current book has chapters running beteween 13-25 pages. The chapters in Whiskey & Water run between 20-40 pages. The chapters in Blood & Iron are slapped in any old place it looks like maybe there should be a chapter, because it didn't have chapters, and my editor asked for them. They're about 20 pp long. (all page counts in standard 250-word Courier pages)

The chapters in One-Eyed Jack run between three pages and fifteen or so, and the ones in Stratford Man are "scenes," and run between a paragraph, and about fifteen pages.

I'm a lot of help, aren't I?

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

No, this is helpful. I mean, there's range out there, and maybe I'm letting myself worry over nothing.

My concern is that I'm overwriting and scenes are dragging as a result. I have to keep telling myself that we're still in the land of First Draft, but it doesn't always help.

My chapters in CODE averaged 13-16 ms pages, but to mangle a line from Linda Ronstadt, that book was so tight it was hemorrhoidal. If I had it to do over, I would not have been so free with the Delete. I think at times I overedited.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm so neurotic about Carnival right now that I'm having to write the whole damned book by hand so that my internal editor doesn't notice I'm working.

Have you noticed we're fucking crazy? I mean, we know how to do this, right?

Right?

*g*

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Have you noticed we're fucking crazy? I mean, we know how to do this, right?

You are soo asking the wrong person. I feel I know less and less as time goes on. I convince myself, however, that the actual body of knowledge that I know is out there has grown at the same time, and that while I know less than I ever did as a percentage of what I know I don't know, I do in fact know more overall than I did 10 years ago.

Honest.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

That's because it does get harder.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

This is the one point that never makes it into any of the handbooks.