Round 105, Hour 3

[xandromedovna]

Documents are open, which means it's time to cut out all the parts that aren't working and hopefully toss in some things that are! Personally I'm just jotting down random notes and hoping something sticks. Are there words or sounds or rows in your future?

Comments

[alexseanchai]

This scene is now 3.2K and still not done. I think I can wrap it up well before 4K, though.

…I know what the next bit would look like on a TV screen. (Ish. More or less.) What I have no idea of is how to render it in text! *tears hair*

Like. 2.5K of that has exactly three speaking characters: the point-of-view character, Rena, and the mother and daughter Rena's addressing. If I clip out a couple more paragraphs, that's 2.2K of predominantly Rena's dialogue with internal commentary from Rena, in which the narrative doesn't acknowledge the existence of anyone else in the room. One of the paragraphs I have to clip out there is later than the rest, but that's still 1.8K in a row in which only the dialogue admits the existence of people other than Rena and this mother and daughter. And there are other people in the room, several of whom are important, and at least a couple of whom would rather Rena didn't say much of what they're saying.

It's no fun to move the conversation to a more private setting, especially since another of those important characters is determined to hear a lot of this. And I suppose I could edit the narrative so Rena gets at least glimpses of what other characters are doing and how they're reacting. Or edit the dialogue so Rena is not in fact going on for two thousand words about stuff it might not be a bright idea to say with an audience.

But an already established plot point is that both the mother and daughter have persuasion magic that works verbally and with proximity. And Rena knows the mother, at least, is using it so Rena answers truthfully. Rena doesn't feel like arguing, because they're not being made to tell any truths they don't want known and they weren't planning on telling any lies, but they already know the magic's in play.

So now that I've just about wrapped up that interrogation, the most fun way I can think of to segue to the next bit is to write a few paragraphs showing how Rena, for the past couple thousand words, has been a distinctly less reliable narrator about what's going on around them than they think they have. The visual in my head is a distortion effect, like circular ripples, while the scene refocuses to encompass more of the room than those three faces. Also showing how these three are now sitting in chairs in a corner of the room, or something, where they were standing in the walkway as of when the narrative last mentioned where anyone else was relative to them or the room.

I have no clue how I'm going to write that in prose that fits right and makes sense.

How do I get myself into these things?

[xandromedovna]

oh wow haha that sounds like quite the conundrum. Is Rena the only POV character? If not, a perspective cut to the other characters reacting like "what the actual fuck just happened?!" could add some humour as well as emphasize the unhelpfulness of this and that unreliableness. Also, am I correct in that Rena (and the other two) are aware there are others in the room? Because that could easily create a situation where those characters either intervene or at the very least react, perhaps behind the back of the other two if that's important? I guess the question is whether or not the other characters would let this situation play out for so long uninterrupted unless there were clear reasons set up ahead of time why they couldn't intervene. Does that help? I feel like I just repeated a bunch of stuff you said lol, good luck!

[alexseanchai]

No, but the only other PoV character in this whole novel is somewhere else altogether. And yeah, they all know there's other people in the room; the mother doesn't care what any of them think, and the daughter can't stop this conversation without people wondering why she wants to, which would make it way harder to repair her reputation later.

I think most of the NPCs want to hear all this too. And if one of the secondary characters says something like "I've been trying to get your attention for the past [X] minutes", before or after he or Rena says something like "so that was super weird, right?", then that emphasizes the reality distortion weird of why Rena wasn't shutting up. Doesn't help me figure out how to describe the reality distortion snapping back to normal, though.

[xandromedovna]

You said they don't describe the others during this, right? Would it work to slowly remove all description altogether so by the end it's just wall of dialogue, or perhaps a repeated motif in the description like just repeating the question in their head or only using a limited vocabulary?