This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
My "pure prose" project is chugging along better than my VN. I've written the first versions of two chapters out of twelve and I am quite enjoying the process. I expect it to speed up next week, when my digital Lent will begin.
I've always known that the writer was not the master of the plot, you just put your characters into a situation and wrote down what happened (and if they tried to derail the story, you had to change the circumstances), but I've noticed another thing. I'd call it "genre brain" vs "sane brain".
It's not so much about "genre savviness", as TVTropes would say. If a realtor wants to sell an expensive condo in a porn flick, she'll personally show the prospective buyer how good the kitchen island, the bedroom, the sofa and the hot tub are for shagging. That's just how the genre works, and the viewer won't accept anything different. If a PI is following a suspect into an unlit warehouse, he is getting pistol-whipped.
But if you just put regular characters that live in your sane, normal-world brain into a genre situation, they won't do this. You can always wipe down the marble countertop or even replace the bedsheets, but dry-cleaning an expensive sofa or cleaning the hot tub just because you thought offering some poon as a bonus might get someone to overpay $250K? And you will get just $2500 out of it?
If you just start changing the circumstances to make the situation work, you will find yourself leaving the genre and that's not what you want to do. Your readers don't want the PI to call the police and watch the entrance. They want to see him lose consciousness with no long-term health repercussions and come to in a different location even if they complain about it afterwards on the internet.
Maybe a talented writer can construct situations that are both realistic and require genre logic from the characters at the same time without feeling contrived. But if you are a regular hack that wants to write straight genre fiction, you have to (hopefully, temporarily) change your brain. You have to think that yes, it's totally normal for someone to buy an overpriced condo just because the realtor, who is obviously a hot buxom woman, is throwing in some no-strings-attached intercourse as a bonus. A "savvy" character living in this "porn brain" will only worry about overpaying if this means he can get another session with the realtor and her equally hot colleague.
And I thought I could switch into this mode at will. "Surely I've read enough noir fiction that I can just slip into this gear and cruise along," though I. Hell no. The writer in me loves how clever he is, how he can get the right outcome despite his characters' realistic worries. The editor in me dreads the moment when he'll have to go back and trim out all the realism that keeps sneaking back in. Not because it requires obvious contrivance, but because it simply makes the story worse.
I had some back-and-forth with @jake on this topic, and I think it ultimately comes down to knowing your audience. If you're writing a work intended as pure escapism, your readers will be a lot more forgiving of contrivances and illogical character decisions. If it's meant to be a work of ruthless psychological realism, your readers will expect the characters to act accordingly and make rational, believable decisions: if the characters just do whatever is most convenient for the author, they will feel cheated. You can also aim to strike a happy medium, having the characters make all the decisions you would expect a character in a work of that genre to do, but also include little details and in-universe justifications for "why didn't he just do X?", to reward readers who are reading more closely than the casual reader. (This is arguably the most difficult approach of the three: escapist genres are escapist for a reason, and they take quite a bit of work to make them seem grounded and psychologically realistic.)
There's also the Coen brothers' favoured approach, which is to have your characters make all the foolish decisions you would expect a character in a noir thriller to make, but establish that those characters are morons in-universe, so that their idiotic decisions seem in-character. Sometimes this can work, especially if the work is a black comedy (as many of the Coen brothers' films are); sometimes it just raises further questions. In Burn After Reading, it makes sense that two airheaded personal trainers have absolutely no idea what they're doing when they attempt to blackmail a former CIA analyst, and end up hopelessly out of their depth. It does not make sense that they are only marginally more moronic than the CIA analyst himself (his alcoholism and grandiosity notwithstanding), or another character who is a US Marshal. Inevitably the audience starts to wonder why such overtly blithering idiots weren't put out to pasture years prior. (All that being said, I did enjoy Burn After Reading, but it's a movie you have to switch your brain off while watching to properly enjoy it, which wasn't the case with Fargo or The Big Lebowski.)
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