Archetype Writing Blog

The chapter I'm editing right now talks about the different approaches to doing therapy.  Therapists actually ask lots of different questions besides "And how do you feel about that?"  Which questions, exactly, depend on which approach the therapist is using.  Also, certain types of therapy are useful for certain types of problems.  So the chapter explains what your fictional therapist should do if you need the therapy session to do this vs. that for your story.  For example, if you need your character to make a connection between something that happened in his childhood and something that's going on now, you need a different kind of therapy than if your character needs to come to terms with his terminal illness.  And don't worry, the chapter explains which therapy for which situation, and why.  And it doesn't stop with telling you what kind of therapy -- it explains what that therapy really looks like and, of course, provides you with the types of questions the therapist would ask so you can make that therapy look authentic.

Fiction:

ToM has gone back to my faithful friends, who are even now wondering how in hell I could possibly add 5000 - 10000 words to the manuscript to make it long enough.  If only the techniques that worked during NaNoWriMo worked for almost-complete manuscripts!

I know how to make it long enough.  Rewrite the whole damn thing in third person, rather than first.  See, when I rewrote it in first, I removed two characters' viewpoints. 

Wait, you think.  If there were three viewpoints, how was it not third person before?

Um...have you ever read Faulker's As I Lay Dying?  It's this book, see, and each chapter is from a different person's viewpoint.  If I remember right, each chapter is in first person.  The problem when I did it, of course, is that I'm not Faulkner.

And it would be really, really a lot of work to switch it over to third person.  First, there's been so much editing since it switched over into first, I'd be semi-starting over if I switched into third person.  Because all of these polished and critted scenes that are in Audrey's POV (Character 1) would need to be handed back to Christian (Character 2) and Jamie (Character 3).  And I'm going to be frank with you.  I'm tired of rewriting this thing from scratch.  I might retire it before I could put myself (and my faithful readers) through another enormous overhaul.

So everybody...think good thoughts in Elana's direction.  She's trying real hard to come up with those extra words for me for the first-person POV version.

Since Shadowwalker is similarly impaired in its early stages, I'm working back over it and fleshing it out.  If the writing gods are good to me, this will require plenty of good words.

Want more information on Work In Progress Wednesdays?  Kate will tell you all about it.