Conclusions from a quick read
Mar. 7th, 2007 01:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_kerinaI was just reading "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy for class and I wanted to see how my writing measured up, not only to a published author but one whom many contend wrote the best work of fiction in the last decade. Here is the opening paragraph to that work.
"
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more grey each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.
"
I learned a few things from this...
1 - A published author can do anything he/she wants with the language. Screw punctuation, run-on sentences, and sentence fragments. In your hands, published author, it's fucking art!
2 - This single page in the book, one of the denser parts of the work, added up to 292 words. It started short, so if you have a full, hardcover, densely paginated type of page like that in your average book...it works out to around 350 to 370 words a page. That means my 240 page manuscript of Meechen would paginate to between 380 and 400 pages in book form. Now that's a page of pure text in a book. You're gonna having something more like 280 to 300 words on an page. Which would put it between 470 and 500 pages...at this point. Let's say I do end up with 250,000 words, all told. 675 pages to nearly 900 pages.
3 - This tells me if I want this sucker published, I'm gonna have to turn it into a lean, mean, anime-girl machine when I go into the 2nd version. Or at least find a published with denser pagination. Also add in my desire to have sketch artwork in each chapter.
But all that's for another day. For now, I have a ton of writing from my notebook to add into Mecchen ^^ *cher!*
"
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more grey each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.
"
I learned a few things from this...
1 - A published author can do anything he/she wants with the language. Screw punctuation, run-on sentences, and sentence fragments. In your hands, published author, it's fucking art!
2 - This single page in the book, one of the denser parts of the work, added up to 292 words. It started short, so if you have a full, hardcover, densely paginated type of page like that in your average book...it works out to around 350 to 370 words a page. That means my 240 page manuscript of Meechen would paginate to between 380 and 400 pages in book form. Now that's a page of pure text in a book. You're gonna having something more like 280 to 300 words on an page. Which would put it between 470 and 500 pages...at this point. Let's say I do end up with 250,000 words, all told. 675 pages to nearly 900 pages.
3 - This tells me if I want this sucker published, I'm gonna have to turn it into a lean, mean, anime-girl machine when I go into the 2nd version. Or at least find a published with denser pagination. Also add in my desire to have sketch artwork in each chapter.
But all that's for another day. For now, I have a ton of writing from my notebook to add into Mecchen ^^ *cher!*
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Date: 2007-03-07 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-07 10:31 pm (UTC)