Expunging Chapters
As much as I hate the thought, I'm going to have to ditch at least a couple of chapters of what I've currently completed of Vitamin F.
When I first made the list of groups I'd make mad with the novel, I knew that Christians as a whole would be one of those groups. Blatantly describing a future world where your religion gets supplanted by another--almost overnight--will tend to make members of the real religion upset. The transition was one I felt was important in the progression of Bridgett's life during the year that starts when she meets Penelope.
The more I've thought about everything, the more I've noticed that the nature of religion in Vitamin F isn't massively important before this problematic point, nor is it important after that point. It's also something that slows me down every time I come to it. Perhaps the idea of a religion capturing the hearts of every person in a single country is a bit too far-fetched for myself. Or it might be that I just didn't care for how that element of the story was playing out.
My solution is to just cut that bit of the story out. I'll have to patch a few things up about it, but the mass conversion angle has to go. There's only so much bullshit an audience can swallow and I think that might be a bit too much.
When I first made the list of groups I'd make mad with the novel, I knew that Christians as a whole would be one of those groups. Blatantly describing a future world where your religion gets supplanted by another--almost overnight--will tend to make members of the real religion upset. The transition was one I felt was important in the progression of Bridgett's life during the year that starts when she meets Penelope.
The more I've thought about everything, the more I've noticed that the nature of religion in Vitamin F isn't massively important before this problematic point, nor is it important after that point. It's also something that slows me down every time I come to it. Perhaps the idea of a religion capturing the hearts of every person in a single country is a bit too far-fetched for myself. Or it might be that I just didn't care for how that element of the story was playing out.
My solution is to just cut that bit of the story out. I'll have to patch a few things up about it, but the mass conversion angle has to go. There's only so much bullshit an audience can swallow and I think that might be a bit too much.
Labels: Bridgett, Writing Progress
posted by LEN! at 5:30 AM
2 Comments:
So will there be something else that kind of gets everybody on board with the New World Order, or will it be more that force was used to just generally crush the spirits of those who might resist?
Or maybe leave how things got this way ambiguous, leave the reader clamoring for more installments, if you were so inclined? I don't know for sure where you've going with it, so I just figured I'd toss those out there.
What I was going to do was have a situation parallel the rapid rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. My parallel would involve the primary religious movement, Fertility, arranging for the majority of the population to convert all at once.
The idea was based upon the thought that, in a world of predominantly women, one where women make the vast majority of the population, why would a religion centered around a male deity have any power?
So, I was going to present the last bits of our modern religious conceptions be wiped away after years of being bred out of society as a whole.
Why didn't that work? Because there's no need for such a shift to take place if it doesn't change anything in the story. I'm still going to use part of that sequence, but only to mark the passage of time and the development of the characters as they approach the closing act of the book.
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