Method Acting
A character in Novel #5 is a novelist. Her works take place in a harder-scifi story world, more disconnected from consensus reality than Rune Skelley likes to have things. Excerpts appear as epigraphs with each of our chapters. It gives us a way to sneak in thematic messages and accentuate events going on in the main narrative, as well as helping to flesh out the character who “wrote” them.
The person who actually wrote them is a character, all right, and he got into character to do it.
Our fictional novelist, for reasons too complicated to go into here, prefers not to see her output. To emulate her process, Kent put his wireless keyboard in his lap and turned his chair to face away from his monitor. Not seeing the words made it easier to resist tampering with each sentence too much, and promoted a more deliberate style of composition. It did slow him down, though. The impact on productivity might be too severe to apply this trick for an entire novel, but when focusing on short passages it is a simple way to alter the way you relate to the words.
We wanted the epigraphs to sound like they were written by someone else. Changing the work conditions helped ensure that the output was distinctive. Matching the conditions faced by our character made it easier to think like her.
Having read Novel #5, I can say that this trick worked.
Also, that’s pretty neat :-)
Thanks! I really enjoyed creating these tiny glimpses into that other universe. The imaginary books they come from are basically the original vision, how the “big idea” would have been expressed. So I was thrilled when we found a way to allow me to play in that sandbox. But I must confess that it’s cheating to just write little snippets. I never had to worry about wrapping things up.
Also, props to Jen for setting me up for success. She developed the titles and basic plot summaries of all the source material, which gave me tremendous inspiration going in.
I wrote 4 of the 25 epigraphs, but did not employ the blindfold approach. Once Kent had about half a dozen of them written, I was able to copy the style he had developed.
Having read it, Reggie, do you think you can tell which ones are mine?