To be honest, this book doesn’t really grab my attention. I started tuning out after chapter 7 or 8 and I finally decided to abandon it after chapter 16. There is nothing really wrong with the author or the narrator per se but it is just not my cup of tea. The plot is essentially too romance-centric and lacking in the type of excitement that I need to sustain interest and the bit of Scottish meta is not absorbing enough for me to really enjoy. So no point for me to just breeze through without really paying attention to it.
One Hundred years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marqez (audiobook)
Again, I did not finish this audiobook because the long Spanish names are getting too confusing and I am mostly tuning out of this story, being absorbed in online jigsaw puzzles that I do concurrently to listening (else I will literally fall asleep). I think when I chose this book it was marketed as magic realism but in practice this just read to me as if it’s a Spanish family historical saga (the magic realism was at the earlier chapters but did not actually feature largely in the story, at least not in 7 chapters)
The character based approach to story is basically the idea that the character is your story so all you have to do is basically really really inhabit your main character and you are done (if you are writing third person limited or first person. Arguably, it’s useful in omniscient too but there you have to inhabit the however many POVs that you switch between and a switch in POV is not a switch in camera angle [quote from one of my UBC instructors] but an entire lens to process the events in the story). A simple and powerful idea.
So what’s my take on this? Well, when I first came across this idea in full, it was through Robert McKee’s Story, specifically chapter 7 which he titled the Substance of Story and I bought the idea right off the bat. But in practice, it works quite differently for me. Firstly, I always conceptualise a story through events and each scene for me pivots around what happens rather than how a particular character experiences the events. Secondly, because I outline in omniscient (or at least a kind of birds’ eye view because it is really hard to say that I outline in a particular voice given that my outline is basically a jumble of notes to self and whatever I know about a particular scene) that means that I have to get into character for a third person limited narration that is my norm for writing. And I have to admit I am not quite adept at this and I can’t say that I am really in character for most of the scenes I have drafted. I am not sure that I can claim a particular scene that I am really ‘in character’ all the way through, snippets certainly but never a full scene. Instead, what I was able to import from McKee was his conceptualisation of beats as a coupled action/reaction between characters (I might have mentioned it before but I never really got what a beat was when I first learnt it through the UBC novel writing course until I read McKee) and his framework of how a story can be conceptualised as a continuous cycle of where the protagonist is trying to bridge the gap between his/her expectations from their actions and results as experienced by them. In fact, both frameworks are occasionally used by me to try to break into a particular scene (I wrote about that topic before).
So in light of all this, despite my initial enthusiasm for the idea, I have come to embrace the idea instead that there are different approaches into story and it is not necessary to always enter it through character in the first draft. The idea is that the story will eventually come to embrace character, plot and theme in its final form and of course I’m now still far from that point.
That’s it for today. Feel free to let me know your own take on this.
I have now switched over to my female protagonist and I’m somewhere in Act 2 for her (her act 1 is pretty much done, unlike my male protagonist).
Now, how am I measuring up against set goals? The honest truth is I don’t know. I am now fully in the tunnel and have absolutely no idea how long before I am about to exit it. So the broad goal of getting up to decimal draft 0.84? No idea, wait and see is my approach.
I also had the mini goal of getting clarity up to the mid-point for both my protagonists which again I have no idea whether I am going to reach or not by the end of this year. I left my male protagonist in a state of “Nope, I don’t know enough about this chapter, come back to it next time” etc. but obviously that is all the way in Act 3 because I always go through the whole story linearly and never stop in middles or jump around much when I write scenes (well, I do jump in a sense because with my iteration approach I often wrote on a piece of scrap paper which chapters I feel I am capable of working on for the current round of drafting for each of my protagonists. That has been the approach for the latest two or three rounds. But I don’t hopscotch all over the story in terms of scenes right off the bat). So to be honest, my male protagonist currently doesn’t even exist for me, that’s the type of myopia I am operating under when I am drafting. I am not quite up to the middle point yet for my female protagonist.
I feel like a structural analysis of the whole novel is coming up for the mini goal. I have said that I try to avoid it because it led to procrastination. But the honest truth is that I have no other method to delve into the story to see clarity otherwise.
This is the state I am at with the WIP. Tune in for the September update.
As the title tells it all, I’m going to crown The Lost Choice: a Legend of Personal Discovery by Andy Andrews with this. At the time of writing I still have not finished this novel yet. But the meaning of Lost Choice does resonate with me.
I don’t think this will be spoiler alert because I am just talking about the theme but what is meant by lost choice is basically the idea that not choosing to act is a choice but it is a lost choice because by choosing to act you can potentially make a difference in the world by impacting others. That’s it, a simple concept.
How this touches me is in two ways. Firstly, I am somewhat of a passive person and there are lots of times when I do not act on my thoughts and intentions. I do not consider them lost choices normally because technically lots are just random thoughts and sure I might be able to make a difference in the world if I act on them but the counterargument is why me in particular to make that difference, why not someone with better skills, better time, better passion etc.? Secondly, co-existing with what I said above, I also personally believe in making differences in a small way. In fact, I tend to stay away from large scope stuff and just focus on small steps. That is how I operate. So technically I do make differences but I tend to focus on the small.
And this is all I have to say for now. You are welcome to add your thoughts in comments.
We landed in Rome without mishap albeit with minor delay and straight off I made a mistake: instead of waiting around at the airport for my booked hotel transfer I went to the taxi stand to see whether my driver would be there and got flagged by a black cab. Result: charged 180 Euro instead of the 65 Euro fixed rate. On top of that, the hotel closed down making us stranded ‘homeless’ in Rome! Tried to ask around for another hotel nearby but apparently there was a tennis match resulting in a short supply of hotel rooms so at the end we took up on the offer of the lady who had a design studio next to the closed down hotel who had a room to rent with a private bathroom. That took most of the morning (we landed at around 8:15am but the hassle of finding alternative accommodation lasted until lunch time).
We ended up not having lunch or rather making do with gelato as lunch. Straight away we could tell a difference between Oceania and Italy: they do not press down on the ice cream cones so that at the end you are left with all cone and no gelato. The cone was average but I did like the mango flavour of gelato that I ordered (we ordered 2 flavours each and I think I had pistachio and mango the first time, the pistachio flavour was only average. Mum had hazelnut and coffee, Mum always chose coffee).
The original plan was to take it easy the first day and do mostly Vatican City (since I picked a hotel in the Prati neighbourhood). So we did St Peter’s square and then we already lost the way trying to find Castello Sant’Angelo and gave up and returned to the accommodation. I also had the intention of returning in the afternoon for St Peter’s Cathedral in the afternoon to avoid the queue (that was in fact written down in my detailed travel itinerary G doc but being too tired Mum and I gave it a miss).
For dinner, we had it at a fastfood place called HFC that was combination KFC and pizzeria. Out of curiosity, I ordered the wurstel and french fries pizza. Well, you couldn’t really taste the french fries but other than that, it was an okay pizza, different from the ones we have in Australia. It was extra cheesy and seemed to taste good in small amount. But the cheesiness got to us after a while.
Day 2 in Rome, we started with catching the metro from Ottaviano to Barberini. And because we slept in, we were already in with the crowd at Trevi Fountain at 10amish. Unlike the Vatican City/Prati region, we managed to hit all the main tourist attractions in Rome despite losing our way often and having to ask for directions. We had a bland tasting seafood aka calamari salad for lunch at Piazza Navona. Later, we had a time mix up and thought we were late for our dinner appointment near the Colosseum at 6:30pm when it was only 3:13pm in Rome. That meant we sat around for a long stretch of time near the eating strip nearby- we had gelato, soft drink etc. The dinner we had was at Trattoria Luzzi. Mum had the carbonara while I had a baked sea bass/bream. Mum didn’t particularly like the carbonara- it was tasteless without the bacon inside and too salty with. My fish was okay but not spectacular. After dinner, we went to the Colosseum to take pictures and only Mum had a picture of the full Colosseum, I only had a pic of me with a corner of the Colosseum which was not identifiable as the Colosseum. But ah well, not that I’m an enthusiast of having pics of myself with all the landmarks.
I just came back from an almost month-long vacation from Europe hoping to have a long sleep session to catch up with jet lag and recovering from the cold, only to find… that our house has been broken into.
As a result, I am calling for rest from blogging for the month of June so that I can recuperate. But worry not. There is plenty to share on the trip after that. Stay tuned!
There are many other resources on these topics and feel free to browse around for a wider range of opinions but what I did was to use S Money to do my currency conversion (I used Travelex for the New Zealand but S Money is offering me a much better conversion rate, S Money is not able to offer me a single trip conversion like Travelex and hence takes a higher service charge compared to Travelex for the same amount of foreign currency needed but the better exchange rate covers it and for a rough idea we are talking about 0.6 compared 0.58x on any given day between S Money and Travelex. The other consideration is that Travelex has way more branches and so you can easily get to a place close by whereas at the end of last year when I started with S Money they only had the single branch on Spencer Street in the city in Melbourne but now it has about 4 locations in Melbourne now and I think they have similar expansions interstate too).
For a travel card, I elected to go with the Suncorp Everyday account because that’s the only non credit card that offers Internet banking for me. I could have elected to go with a credit card and I tried applying for the Latitude Platinum Mastercard because it offered free wifi as a perk but I gave up because once I saved my application and tried to resume I just couldn’t get back in. When I rang customer service, I was told that basically there was only one number for all applicants to connect to and that you just had to try logging onto the system every 15-20 minutes. I tried that about 5 or 6 times and being impatient in nature, I just gave up on it. That and Mum continuously worrying me about applying for a credit card and the interest rate charges involved. In practice, I’ve found out that while the Suncorp does not charge the visa 3% fee for transacting with overseas companies, if the other side charges it (eg. Swiss railway company), then you still incur the 3% but ah well, it still beats the bank card of our Big 4 bank that automatically slaps on the 3% charge on.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 