Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Day 18 - 1429 Words - More Fuehrer Or Less Fuehrer?

It was said that during the filming the movie Max, which was an alternate history about a young Adolf Hitler as an art student, the director was trying to give some complicated directions to the actor who played Hitler, Noah Taylor. Taylor interrupted him and told him, "All you need to tell me is whether you want 'more Fuehrer' or 'less Fuehrer.'"

I like this story as a metaphor for good clean communication, because not only was Taylor's statement short and effective, it was also colorful and entertaining.

We should all be able to handle explanations and exposition that well.

But since a mystery is about investigation (which involves not only the information, but also differing points of view of the same information, and red herring info too) it can be a real trick to get to that clean "more Fuehrer/less Fuehrer" statement.

This is what I'm struggling with right now. This is why it's been hard to get through this particular section of scenes. I'm dealing with the information gathering part of the story. The body has been found, and everybody steps back and says, "okay, what's really going on here?" This is also the first moment when things slow down enough for characters to ask questions about subplot issues that have come up. I will not be surprised if I don't end up throwing this stuff out on the next go around and rewrite it completely yet again.

But I must get through it first. I must lay it all out to see where I need more or less info. Where to move it, etc.

The good news is that I just passed this info-tainment section, and have gotten back to some action. The next couple of chapters are still a mess, but I think part of that is because I didn't have the chapters before it done.

While I didn't do the full 2500 words - ALL of the words I wrote today were new words. And they feel like good words. So I am pleased.

(I also did about 2000 words on the series bible and plot arcs on the new character for the Serial.)

Running Total: 36131 Words.


36131 / 75000 words. 48% done!

In Today's Pages: George learns a little bit about the problems of three little people in this crazy world.

1 comment:

Hart Johnson said...

It's such a tricky balance, isn't it? Mystery's greatest trick is how to make the sleuth and the reader spot things together, so the READER feels respected to see it (instead of being totally spoon-fed), and the sleuth doesn't look like an idiot. As a reader, I think I like to be right in my guesses ahead of the sleuth maybe 30-50% of the time... any more, and I am annoyed that an idiot is the crime solver. Any less and it feels like God in a Box...

You're making great progress!