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[spoilers!]
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When I started, The Answer was one somewhat shorter story, “finished”, I thought. I’d posted several to BC; The Answer was to be next. Its first was that it had notes for a sequel, which most of my stories don’t.
Doing a last minute read through, I realized the story had three flawed section, and needed some justification before the “suspension of disbelief” kicked in. (Common tropes: that people don’t recognize each other with differences of hair, makeup, and clothes; that a boy could pass that well, suddenly; that the female characters would accept him so readily. These are things we’d like to believe, some of them, but still require verbiage of minimal justification to pay for the suspension of disbelief.)
Along the way, I decided to break it up: my first multi-part story. Perhaps I’d be fortunate enough to reap some audience anticipation…
As I reviewed each part, and polished it, things grew a bit. And then I came to chapter five. The ending suddenly seemed wrong. Alice suggested an alternative, but it would call for rewriting the fifth part, and writing a sixth. And then I cast an eye to the calendar.
Halloween had fled, Aunt Phyllis was scheduled for Thanksgiving; there was a scene on the cutting room floor of Felicity and Phil, the office Christmas party, and the bonus from the doctor.
But now I had a commitment ceremony to plan, and my mind wanted to put it in Allerton Park, outdoors. In what must be the December. in Central Illinois.
The tyranny of the calendar said no.
And perhaps if I was a more experienced writer, I could have orchestrated it, but with real life work intruding, other plot lines languishing, somethings just had to give. Somebody else would have to slap Phil some other time, The Christmas bonus was going to stay offscreen.
A night spent relaxing with the Marx brothers at the opera led to a sketched comedy. It COULD have been more fleshed out, but I think it is all there in principle, and Alice still pulls Paul out of it in the end.
Comments
The Answer
Hello Lynda - DETAILS! Very few of us who write here are likely to win the Pulitzer Prize. Your stories are very well written and fun to read. ALL TG/TS/TV fiction turns the cross-dressed protagonist into a good looking female. It’s a big part of our fantasy. Don’t worry too much about the little details. Just write fun stories and express whatever is in your head.
Marx Brothers - they were AWESOME! IMHO, either the mirror scene from “Duck Soup”, or Abbot & Costello’s “Who’s on First” are the very best bits of comedy ever.
Janice
Hey...
"You canna fool me! There ain't no Sanity Clause!"
Love, Andrea Lena
Well, atsa' fine...
Well, atsa' fine...
suspension of belief
That's the crux of all fiction that deviates from the mundane. I've run into the problem you've cited in my own fiction. The way I deal with it in the end is to out the protagonist in the end. So that it turns out while it seems that no one realized that our hero(ine) was really a male bodied individual, but were simply accepting enough to let it slide. That in itself requires some suspension of belief, but some how that seems to fly better than that "his own mother wouldn't recognize him" does.
That also plays into our fantasy to some extent. Along with being a gorgeous female we want people not to care that we are transgendered and presenting across gender lines.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
I try to gauge degrees of
I try to gauge degrees of familiarity; Alice doesn’t recognize Paul as he was always out when Mike snuck her into the dorm room; Paul Doesn’t recognize Alice for that, and reasons of changed demeanor and hair; the professor doesn’t recognize an old cross-dressed student, but Mike recognizes Paul based on his familiarity from their time as roommates with relative ease.
Experience
Experience is how we avoid mistakes. We get experience by making mistakes.
Thanks for the note and thanks for sharing some of your process with us.
I am finding that about a third of what I write (by word count) is just continuity tracking and timeline planning. Another third are ideas and sketches that will never get posted. The third third are projects "underway". I guess that adds up to three thirds. The amount that I actually do post is statistically insignificant.
Your friend
Crash
Sharing
I love blogs about writing, because I am a writer, and I don't really know why.
I sometimes wonder if I am a bit of freak, because I had never written a word of fiction (since perhaps the age of 12) until a few years ago and then I just started writing after reading a few TG stories. Now I just barf up words daily. It is like an affliction.
I am hopeless with proofing which is why I am lucky to have found assistance. I don't agonize over structure and syntax. I just read through and if I am happy I post on Patreon and then send to edit.
I avoid tropes but I never concern myself if they pop up. Of course our heroines are outrageously pretty, but that is how we all want them to be.
As for length, readers of my blogs , comments and maybe even the stories, will understand that I write short stories not because I necessarily want to, but because that is the way they end up.
TBH I find that if a story is long it is hard to leave and come back to. I almost feel that you need to read it from the start before you can pick it up and carry on, so that you maintain the rhythm of it, and in my case, stick with the style you chose.
I have started stories with casts of characters and sketched plot lines, but I sometimes feel that too many characters and structured plots ruin the creative flow.
I have only read one story of yours about the voice actor I think for dubbing one of those Japanese manga with a TG element (?) which is a great idea - I would love to use it.
I will look at "The Answer" but my only suggestion is that you try to let flow.
I don't like the idea of "fleshing out" - it sounds like words for words sake. But that might be just me - I tend to use the minimum to say the maximum.
The bloggers on this site are mainly writers so I am sure many of us can assist with suggestions.
Happy writing!
Maryanne
Feel free to borrow a concept
Feel free to borrow a concept you like; as I said, I borrowed a key scene from Robert Downey Jr. in ”Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”...
I hope I don’t do words for words sake, but I find sometime my mid draft is a little sketchy, or assumes you’ll know what a character is feeling, and I feel a need to make things more explicit.
As for length, a lot of ideas end up short stories; “The Answer” surprised me by going as long as it did.