End of Day 1

Having reached the end of the first day of combining writing with blogging, I can say the two aren't very different. I just completed about 1K words of the story, making up a little as I went but mostly following the story line that exists already in my mind. How do you describe a foreign culture that hasn't ever been seen? How, more importantly, do you describe what you're trying to set up as a meta-culture, consisting of bits and pieces of every major culture on the planet? How, most importantly, do you do all this without boring the reader with too much describiness?

I know, there are some who like it a lot, this describiness metric I just invented but have no idea how to measure yet. While I skipped whole parts of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series as it got into Book 944, page 1,456,345, other people complained that he wasn't adding enough describiness to the story. That's what I hear, anyway...most people I actually talk to say he was too damn wordy. I mean, there's a difference between saying that the hero walks into a clearing and hears a noise, which is arguably not descriptive enough, and describing every leaf and tree in the clearing and going into several thousand words of discussion of what the noise might sound like, which is clearly too...um, describy.

I'm leaning toward the former, being a guy and an engineer by training. My beloved wife continues to press me for more details..."What were the twins wearing when they went down to dinner?" "Clothes, of course." "What kind of clothes?" "The kind that covered their asses?" But I get it, I really do. Some people prefer greater levels of descriptiveness, and others do not. OK, fine. But I want to avoid at all costs this describiness that some authors seem to lean toward.

So, while avoiding it, I managed to write about a thousand words. Could've easily been ten thousand, but I don't think it would've been any better of a story. That was what I got into in some of my research this weekend..."How many words should a novel contain?" is always answered by "As many as it takes to tell the story," which is like saying a guy needs to be tall enough to reach the ground with his legs. Duh. But there's a fundamental truth there, I guess.

In any event, I'm done being descriptive for the evening, and it's time to seek the comfort of my sheets. Good night, both worlds, and I pray both will be eagerly awaiting me in the morning.

V7N Blog Challenge