Comments on: What Are Your Tent-Pole Moments?

By: JES

JES — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:12:29 +0000

Ha! So now I know the secret to getting your hard-earned dollar!

By: bets

bets — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:16:01 +0000

dennis–lol

Most of writing is just hard.

By: denniscass

denniscass — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:13:20 +0000

@JES: I think you’ve got the tent pole idea right, but I’m not sure doing these scenes is any more fun or not fun than anything else.

Plus, as one of your future readers, I don’t really care if you have fun or not. I just want your book to be good.

By: mapelba

mapelba — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:56:39 +0000

Tent poles are making me think of a big wind that is going to come and knock them all over. The big wind known as someone else’s opinion.

By: Dennis Lang

Dennis Lang — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:48:47 +0000

I’m thinking the T-P process also holds for journalism/nonfiction where the story doesn’t originate in the writer’s imagination but is discovered through research, interviews, observations. Now, confronted with legal pads of notes and transcriptions the challenge is to formulate it all into that riveting, revealing narrative.

By: JES

JES — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:50:40 +0000

I know of novelists who write the story’s tent-pole scenes first — all the big, actiony, important scenes — then go back and stitch ‘em altogether with connecting tissue.

What has discouraged me from trying this in the past is that it feels like front-loading all the fun bits, and distributing all the grunt work throughout, say, the last 75% of the writing. I keep thinking it’ll be better to my mental health to distribute all the goodies (almost recreational writing, if that makes sense) over the course of a book’s writing, rather than bunch it up at either end.

(I may be misreading what you mean by tent-pole moments!)

By: bets

bets — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:38:41 +0000

Ok interesting concept. I find that these moments establish character and signify change to my mind. They tend to get lots of scribbles around them on my plots.

I’ll have to play with this.