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Tribes and triangles
Dec. 2nd, 2009 05:36 pmI've got two chapters nearly done. So far so good. Now I'm going to take several chapters/scenes and crunch them into one. Hopefully that will remove a lot of nonessentials and excess wordage. (The professional commentary I've gotten says that it isn't necessarily wordy, but apparently the pacing is slow. So, I'm getting out the big pruning shears.) Wish me luck!
I've been thinking about tribes lately, and how I seem to belong to a number of them. I get people here like my husband doesn't because they ARE my tribe. I probably attended sports and band events they were present at (representing different sides, of course. :) DH can't quite reconcile that with the NJ tribe--which involved going on vacation to places like Martha's Vinyard (and no, we didn't see anyone famous--but we did see a rabbit and Plymouth Rock, eat clam chowder and act up while visiting church on the island, which resulted in my mom getting her wallet stolen...Those are the important things when you're five. :) The tribes I share with DH are the LDS culture/intermountain west one (my mom and both his parents are from Idaho--we said we're Idahoans born in exile) and the expatriate one. And I guess the grad school/academia one. And of course I'm part of the children's writing tribe. What tribe(s) are you a part of?
And sort of, but not really, tribes-related, I've realized that a lot of love triangles in books don't work for me. It's not that I can't believe someone would end up in that situation--I've known people who have--but it's hard for me to sympathize. You might get entangled if you like someone and someone close to them likes you, and you don't want to hurt any feelings but everyone is sewn up in an unhappy circle of unrequited love. But I can't sympathize with a character who honestly thinks they're wildly in love with more than one person at the same time. I mean, hello? I want to shake them--if you are in that deep, sweetie, you should have figured things out by now. But then, I was not the girl who liked a different boy every week. I rather suspect that I'd be in Hufflepuff because loyalty is rather important to me. (But not at the expense of integrity, I add. "My country, right or wrong," as I once saw on a billboard, is not my motto, for example.) Anyway, I was trying to think of ways that a character could be in a triangle without making me want to throttle them, and I thought that maybe they could have been in two different tribes, each time not thinking they would be anywhere else ever again, and then the two worlds collide, and now they have a problem. I do find Facebook confusing for that very reason--too many worlds in which I was very submerged, and now they appear all at once and I don't even know what language to post in, let alone anything else. The same topics are not equally interesting to all tribes.
Thoughts on tribes, triangles, and tossing useless scenes welcome!
I've been thinking about tribes lately, and how I seem to belong to a number of them. I get people here like my husband doesn't because they ARE my tribe. I probably attended sports and band events they were present at (representing different sides, of course. :) DH can't quite reconcile that with the NJ tribe--which involved going on vacation to places like Martha's Vinyard (and no, we didn't see anyone famous--but we did see a rabbit and Plymouth Rock, eat clam chowder and act up while visiting church on the island, which resulted in my mom getting her wallet stolen...Those are the important things when you're five. :) The tribes I share with DH are the LDS culture/intermountain west one (my mom and both his parents are from Idaho--we said we're Idahoans born in exile) and the expatriate one. And I guess the grad school/academia one. And of course I'm part of the children's writing tribe. What tribe(s) are you a part of?
And sort of, but not really, tribes-related, I've realized that a lot of love triangles in books don't work for me. It's not that I can't believe someone would end up in that situation--I've known people who have--but it's hard for me to sympathize. You might get entangled if you like someone and someone close to them likes you, and you don't want to hurt any feelings but everyone is sewn up in an unhappy circle of unrequited love. But I can't sympathize with a character who honestly thinks they're wildly in love with more than one person at the same time. I mean, hello? I want to shake them--if you are in that deep, sweetie, you should have figured things out by now. But then, I was not the girl who liked a different boy every week. I rather suspect that I'd be in Hufflepuff because loyalty is rather important to me. (But not at the expense of integrity, I add. "My country, right or wrong," as I once saw on a billboard, is not my motto, for example.) Anyway, I was trying to think of ways that a character could be in a triangle without making me want to throttle them, and I thought that maybe they could have been in two different tribes, each time not thinking they would be anywhere else ever again, and then the two worlds collide, and now they have a problem. I do find Facebook confusing for that very reason--too many worlds in which I was very submerged, and now they appear all at once and I don't even know what language to post in, let alone anything else. The same topics are not equally interesting to all tribes.
Thoughts on tribes, triangles, and tossing useless scenes welcome!
