The Sympathetic Parent

You guys are my sanity.

What do you make of this? (I won't tell you how much research I went through for these paltry paragraphs!)

Penpa is in a melancholic mood. She's feeling claustrophobic; she wants out.

I'm looking at her responsibilities and routine and growing unrest from third person limited (Blinky) and then easing out with a third person omniscient (which bridges across to Penpa's third person limited in the passage that follows). In this way, I'm attempting to place the reader temporarily into a sympathetic parental role. Furthermore, I want to avoid any idea that Penpa is feeling sorry for herself (for the moment).

Does it work?

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Blinky's nose twitched. Breakfast was ready.

He pawed away the last of his dream butterflies and yawned and stretched, and then dropped from the bed and scuttled around the pot-bellied stove and sprang onto his stool at Penpa's side. She had prepared two bowls of baby freshwater clams and boiled ptarmigan eggs; but she had not touched a morsel.

She had shouldered a yoke laden with pails of water from the stream down-mountain to the lighthouse; she had harvested the clams and removed their beards and steamed them; she had scouted the rocks for snow-white eggs, invisible upon the snow-white banks; she had gathered kindling and firewood into a sling and lit the stove with sparks from her tinderbox; and now she would not eat the fruit of her labours.

Naturally, Blinky had helped out, but still he eyed her ruefully as he gulped down the clams.

Penpa had barely eaten for a season since they had encountered the nomads. She gazed through the large, oval window. Watery sunlight spread her silhouette over the exquisitely carved beams and onto the domed ceiling of the bedchamber. A wistful intensity blazed in her narrow eyes, like that of a child endlessly fascinated and constantly surprised by the magic of the world.

---

Toward or Towards?

Q. Does he walk toward the girl or towards the girl?
A. Either.

If you want the nitty-gritty about prepositions and American English vs English English and subjectivity, these'll sort you out:
Englishrules.com
Grammar.ccc.commnet
Grammar.qdnow.com

Q. Does he move forward or forwards?
A. As above.

All I'd add is that it's probably a sensible idea to remain consistent.
And that pic is a liquid argon calorimeter. It came up when I typed 'toward' into google. Nice slippers.

Character CPR

My king and queen were too flat.
Ironically, I do have a girl who is literally flat, but that's by-the-by.
Fortunately, it didn't take me too long to work out why, and also to apply a good deal of character CPR.

Just as we give our protag clear goals and desires, the same is true of our other characters.
My king and queen want to suck Penpa's soul.
But why? And, more importantly, how can I convey this without slowing the pace?

I began with the idea that souls are their sustenance: they feed on souls in order to live.
'Let us taste the sweetness of your soul,' says the king, licking his lips.
Well, that's okay I guess, but it's not special, and the lovely John Jarrold told me that only special writing gets picked up these days.
So I thought a little harder.
And I came up with the idea of sexual pleasure.
Instead of a necessity, my king and queen should be whimsical and selfish, taking lives for their own pleasure. Instantly, their characters begin to radiate fresh and vivid colours.
And the pace?
As Sunset Bickham suggests (and ricardo too in a recent post), dialogue serves as a rapid delivery system.
So dialogue alternates rapidly between king and queen, and the sexual undertones are obvious. (I wrote, as I always do, as many theme words as I could think of. I also hit the sensory stuff full-on and 'taste the sweetness' became 'savour the saltiness'.)
Quirks are good, and I had the king and queen locked in a sexual game of simile creation ('Let your soul slip from your bones like ...'). Hey, you're welcome to make suggestions if you want ...
The king's similes are unimaginative and raw, and the queen's are powerful and poetic. Show, show, show.
And their attire: sure, the king had a crown set with jacinth and the queen had a crown of leaves.
Dull, dull, dull. No character at all. (Don't hit me: it was only first pass material!)
Now the king wears a crown of knotted tongues and the queen a diadem of pulsating arteries.
Oh yeah, baby: saved by the theme!
And the queen has a staff topped by a glowing gem.
Nope. The queen has a staff mounted by a glowing gem, and she pulls it between her thighs.
Yep.
And the tongues wag into life, and the keywords intensify, and the king and queen lose themselves to their game as the camera switches from one to the other at speed and pulls right in to the scene and Penpa will surely die to sate their wicked carnal desires ..!

I remember years ago having a mock driving test with my instructor. I stalled at a junction and asked her if the examiner would fail me for such an infraction.
She replied that I'd be fine so long as I kept cool and remembered my training.

With all these techniques at my disposal, I do feel a certain calm: a belief that, when these problems occur (and they will always occur), I'll be able to identify them and find the root cause and then make amends for my stupidity. And I fully intend to continue learning!

Fight Scene

I seem to have become embroiled in matters of pacing.
Having performed a hefty amount of begoogled research, I've come across some strange and spurious results. One pro writer even suggested that poor pacing is the number one reason why manuscripts get rejected. Furthermore, it's difficult to find useful, practical advice on pacing: many writers simply suggest that it's difficult to find useful, practical advice on pacing.
So we turn our attention to Mr. Pullman once again.
In this scene, Lyra and Will and Pantalaimon are confronted by Mrs. Coulter and her monkey daemon:

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And the monkey leapt for her. The cat reared up, slashing with needle-paws left and right too quick to see, and then Lyra was beside Will, tumbling through the window with Pantalaimon beside her. And the cat screamed and the monkey screamed too as the cat's claws raked his face; and then the monkey turned and leapt into Mrs Coulter's arms, and the cat shot away into the bushes of her own world, and vanished.
---

Righty, here we see a superb technique for creating that frenzied type of pacing that thrusts the reader right up close. I discovered this technique whilst writing a dream sequence for An Angel's Canvas, in which I wanted to convey a type of panicky confusion that built to a blinding crescendo.
I start by imagining a camera in the scene. That camera focuses on one character and then switches to another. These switches pick up pace and gradually introduce more and more characters, or focal points (characters or objects that our attention is briefly drawn to), and the length of time spent on one focal point diminishes.
In this way, A did this, and B reacted; A did that, B did something else, C did this, A did that and C reacted and D entered with B doing this and A doing the other with C getting involved ...
You can see how disorientating this technique is. And if we are endeavouring to find the heart of a scene - its essence - we can see how this technique is superb for the fight scene which is, in many instances, fast-paced and disorientating. Remember, we're not simply telling a story: we're creating an experience - we're recreating the reader's experiences and splicing these together into a unique whole.

In Pullman's fight scene, see how quickly he switches between focal points, and how many focal points he uses:
Monkey > cat > needle-paws > Lyra > Will > window > Pantalaimon > cat > monkey > cat's claws > monkey's face > monkey > Mrs. Coulter's arms > cat > bushes.

As I suggested yesterday, short, stumpy sentences create a disjointed feeling. Check out how Pullman marries this with the long, flowing sentences. And check out the conjunctions! What he is doing here is forming repetitions that create a pattern in the reader's head such that she feels a pulse and skims the repetitions. In this way, the genius Pullman is able to use full-stops followed by conjunctions in order to augment the disjointed, uncomfortable nature of the action without harming the pace. Patterns are superb for generating a rhythmic pulse, bringing the reader into a trance-like state, propelling the narrative along, as a drum pattern might carry a melody.
Finally, Pullman uses a comma before the 'and vanished' as a kind of brake mechanism, slowing to allow the reader a breath at the end of this passage.