Sleep is important to us, or well me. I like me some sleep. I enjoy sleep and get many of my ideas from dreams. However, when I first started writing novels, I had a little problem. My character in the romance novel from 2008 NaNoWriMo went to bed often. Sure sometimes it was for fun play but sometimes it was just for sleep. And it's not just the romance. I used to end chapters with the character going to bed because I thought that was good to show and marked a good end of chapter as it was end of the character's day.
Glad I have learned otherwise before submitting those novels anywhere. I still am working on that factor in edit though I got a portion of them out in the first rewrite.
Because the thing is, while sometimes we wonder if during an adventure the characters ever do things like sleep, go to the bathroom, shower and such, for the most part we don't need to see them actually do it.
The thing we don't want to do is make the reader fall asleep. And if the character is going to sleep too often the book may end up getting put down because or not read in its entirety because they got bored and skipped to the better parts.
Sleep is good but there are times and places for it.
Do you like sleep?
Ever have a problem with characters sleeping in stories?
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5 comments:
Hi Dawn.
You must be exhausted. Last year I did the challenge on two blogs--eek. I'm glad it's over and we can all get back to normal. No doubt everyone will need a big sleep!
Denise
I've got the LETTERS challenge up for RFW. Hope you can participate again--it's been great reading your stories.
Denise - Thanks. I was tired from all the blogging. Glad it's over.
I love sleep! I just don't get enough of it as an insomniac. I often wondered about those things too in adventure stories such as when do these characters take care of bathroom issues, sleeping, eating, etc and wondered about mentioning it in my work. Cool post - made me think about allowing time for those in my character's daily activities
Of course I like sleep! Every student needs as much sleep as we can get.
www.modernworld4.blogspot.com
I love sleep and am not the night owl I used to be. But I'm also not an early bird, so...not sure where that leaves me :/
I don't have a problem with characters sleeping in stories, but do often find my darlings sighing and making too much eye contact! I guess we all have our fallbacks ;)
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