Architecture and Scale

I'm now back from my holiday and, while catching up on my reading, I found this post not only interesting, but considering I posted a week's work of drawing related stuff, kinda fitting.

I've mentioned before I'm a pantser. I write to find the story. If I knew the ending before I started, well, then I wouldn't have to write it, would I?

Is that strange?

Well, in all my animation classwork, I was the same way. Guidelines were always pretty loose as long as you fulfilled the criteria, and often I would get so involved with a tiny, insignificant project, I'd end up running full-steam ahead (like usual) and tripping myself up with deadlines... like turning a 5 second squash & stretch (to show weight) assignment into a 20 second clip... thereby quadrupling the amount of work I had to do in the same short amount of time. Don't you think a pair of underwear dancing across a bedroom floor is way more interesting then a sack of flour simply walking across the screen?

But scale is important. Understanding the scope of the world, the story and the characters is as important as understanding which word is *appropriate* to use in a line of dialogue or description. A ten-year-old kid isn't going to be thinking works like 'effervescence' while watching a chemical (or magic?) reaction in a flask, even if that is the *correct* word to describe what's going on.

The problem with my dancing underwear animation was that I didn't understand scale at the time. Sure, my animation was like four or five times longer than my classmates, it was original and it made everyone laugh, but because I overextended myself, the overall quality was low. Some movements were too slow, some too fast, and in animation, even though every movement is exaggerated, it still has to look real or you won't get that suspension of disbelief. In a story, it's the same thing. If a line of dialogue or action seems unrealistic, the reader is going to notice it's just words on a page, just like badly timed movements will ultimately reduce a g-string doing the tango with a pair of boxer shorts to a blur of clumsy pencil lines.

That's what happens when you lose perspective and concentrate too much on one aspect... you sacrifice other parts and you end up with a lower quality piece in the end. Every writer naturally has things that come easy and things that come hard. All of us are imbalanced, and our stories reflect this.

Go read that article and think about your own story. Have you skimmed over things like setting 'cause you like writing dialogue? Do all your character's voices sound the same? Are they using appropriate words when they speak? How is your timeline, do things happen realistically slow/fast depending on the action or situation? Are there 50 references in the first ten pages describing what your two main characters look like, but do they inhabit a *white-room* world? If you can't dig into your story and find your own weaknesses, find a beta-reader who will.