Lani’s cleaning house today, Krissie’s pedal to the metal on a borrowed computer she hates, and I’m grocery shopping and trying to figure out my last scene in this act.
I am getting a lot done, I think, but it’s because it’s a collaboration. If I get stuck, I go in to Campfire and yell, “Help!” (because if I yell “Fire” nobody comes), and Lani or Krissie or both log on and we talk it out. Plus I owe these women. If I zone out in a panic attack, they can’t move forward. Collaborating really speeds up my process.
But now I have an elide and a scene to write to finish out this act, and it’s not the big finish, Daisy gets that one, and it has to do several things:
It has to complete Shar’s arc of getting to know and getting comfortable with her powers.
It has to foreshadow the end of Act Three because I wrote a piece of scene that does that and we rearranged the book so that it works better that way.
It has to arc the romance, which right now is sprained because she won’t sleep with him and while she has some good reasons, the guy’s a god and he wants her and he’s a sweetheart to boot. I’m not contriving the conflict, I really think she wouldn’t, but I haven’t got it on the page yet.
It has to be about painting a mural and naming a coffee house.
It has to get in some back story that’s Lani’s been sniping at me for. (I hate back story.)
And about forty other things I don’t remember.
But first, I went to the grocery and got stuff to make cookies. For the book. No, really. Then I came home and Campfired with Krissie for awhile with the dogs curled up on the bed. I bought them chew toys at the grocery, but Milton ate a Dick Blick catalog instead. And then I tried to block out the beats for tomorrow’s scene.
So what are beats? They’re units of conflict within a scene, scenettes, if you like.
In the scene I wrote yesterday, the first beat is Shar walking home with Sam, arguing with him.
Then something happens, a mini turning point, and they have to deal with a problem, and she’d have to be a heartless bitch not to stop arguing and help, so the second beat is them working together and him doing everything right, even though she’s still angry with him. This second beat has higher stakes because she still has good reason to be leery of him, but he’s really admirable. So now she’s torn.
Then something happens, another turning point, and the stakes in the scene get higher for her, she’s more tempted to relent, and she acts to escape, which deepens her knowledge of Sam and makes things more difficult for her.
When that beat breaks, she moves away, trying to solve her problem, and her solution actually leads to an even more intimate connection that ends when she finally walks away, terrified, but changed from who she was at the beginning of the scene, in conjunction with the way their relationship has changed.
I need to go back and make sure that both Shar and the relationship arc through those four beats. Also Sam, also Wolfie, and Shar’s use of her powers. Each one of those beats has a microscopic shift in it for all five of those story aspects. And they all have to be well-motivated.
But I’ll do that in the rewrite, not in the first draft.
So I have beats for tomorrow’s scene sketched in: Shar painting the mural and arguing with Daisy, Shar using her powers to help Abby and pointing out the problem with that to Daisy, and then the break-in which is not Shar vs. Daisy, but I can figure that out–but what I really worked on tonight was the elide. It’s shorter but trickier than a scene, and mine is actually way too long, but I’m going to leave it like that until I get the whole act done–tomorrow!–in rough and I can see where I’m repeating and what the reader doesn’t need to know. I love writing this fast, it keeps it so fresh, but I think it only works in collaborations. I can do 40,000 words this way, but I don’t think I can do 100.
2020 Note: Try “segue” for “elide.” It’s really a slide/transition kind of thing. Anyway, don’t get hung up on it. I babble.
What’s an elide?
Yo, second on the elide. I thought it must be a typo, but you’ve said it before.
Same thing I wanted to ask. In my dictionary it says that it’s kind of an anulment in law. So are you a lawyer, too?
I was going to ask for clarification too. I’ve seen Diana Gabaldon refer to an elided POV, In her story, Claire might start the scene, but another character will enter and start telling a story. So in the course of the scene, the action moves into another point of view as the other character (ie Jamie) tells what happened in his experience (“while I was playing my bagpipes I met Santa Claus and he and I went for a pint…”) — kind of like a flashback in a movie. Is this what you’re referring too? And, is this where the backstory will come in?
Oh, BTW the copyright comment on D&G reminded me I meant to post this yesterday — they just discovered a forgery at the Art Institute of Chicago.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-forgery_12dec12,0,3289465.story?coll=chi_tab02_layout
Must be Goodnight cousins from across the Atlantic….
Julie, thank you. Always good to know that something I made up is possible (g).
Lani and Krissie were laughing about the elide; they said I made it up and when I checked the Wiktionary I couldn’t find the right definition, but Lani found it in another one. It’s a kind of literary slide, I suppose like summary. Mine is really terrible at the moment, but it gets me from Shar’s scene on Saturday morning to her scene on Monday night.
Ooh, I have a nice source if you need anything on naming a coffeehouse – they had a discussion on Ask Metafilter on that topic a while back. Sadly, none of the usual derails into entertaining conversation, but plenty of suggestions.
About the elide: surely it stems from the same source as elision which is the closing of the space in front of words that begin with a vowel and are preceded by an article ending in a vowel: l’etoile, for example. Or perhaps l’argent.
it’s also sometimes used in linguistics to describe a particular morphological phenomenon that basically amounts to lazy tongue – which is actually more efficient than garbling out all those individual vowels and such. Especially if you’re French (see above).
But more importantly – cookies?
I’m familiar with the term elision (n) and elide (v) in linguistics. It comes from the Latin verb elido which means ‘throw out’ or ‘destroy’.
But Jenny uses ‘elide’ as a noun, so it may have a different root. On the other hand, it does seem to be a trend in American English to use verbs as nouns – for instance, I’ve come across ‘the reveal’ several times.
Or I could just have made it up. I don’t remember.
Sad, when the mind goes.
One of the meanings for elide I found is to cut short, abbreviate, which matches your idea of a summary.
Besides, there’s the Hotel Elide in Rome and a county in Greece, for those who rather travel than write.
Huh?
Precisely.
Elide=segue? Or mini-intro? The first is what came to my mind.
Well, at least when your mind goes, we have great stuff to read as a result.