Writing Report April 26, 2024

Wrapped up the first draft on my latest novel on April 7, clocking in at a whopping 124,160 words.

W-a-a-a-y too much for this wort of story.  An acceptable length for a historical epic or a sci-fi / fantasy tale but much too long for what used to be called mainstream but is now referred to as literary fiction.

Part of the problem is that I tend to overexplain and repeat myself then I repeat my overexplanations so I need to explain yet again my overexplanations and…

See the problem?

Story takes place from 1950-1972, mostly around a local TV station.  I spent an enormous amount of time researching obscure little details that really don’t contribute to the narrative.

Case in point:

“We’ve got two big maps,” [the technical director] said [to the weather girl].  “Both are painted on a thin sheet of steel.  We use magnetized symbols to show where the weather is coming from.  [We] set up the maps with pressure fronts and storm warnings and whatnot before you go on the air.  You just point to them as you read your cue card and leave the rest to us.”

“Tell her about the Technamation,” [the art director] said.

“It’s a filter system we put on the studio lights.  The magnetized symbols use polarized designs.  When we turn the filters on the lights, it makes them pulsate or look like rain is falling and stuff like that.”

I saw this stuff on TV all the time when I was a kid, but it only worked in black and white broadcasting, not color, so once local stations switched over to color the Technamation system was abandoned.

That’s the kind of detail that adds veracity to a story.

It’s also utterly unimportant to the story itself, so it’s probably going to go.

But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to share all that research here and now.

© Buzz Dixon