A great addition, Dan. As for the length of the letter, well, maybe you'll have to decide when you can see it in context to the whole? If you were planning on, say, 4 Cantos, then maybe it's a bit long, but for something Omeros-esque I don't think it'd be considered long at all.
Narratively, I think this is working out pretty well so far.
Thank you, James! I had to look up Omeros. I haven’t touched too many modern epic poems (only because i’ve primarily been a reader of prose-fiction). Do you recommend Omeros?
But yes, I think the letter and its length will be something I can only judge properly when I have completed the story. I don’t know that it will be quite so long as a Homerian epic, but I foresee the Cantos numbering somewhere in the double digits.
Well done Dan. The pacing and the tension when the twins from the bank come in kept me hooked. The backstory/exposition with the letter feels a bit dense. It feels at times more like straightforward prose. But there's a lot of great lines and passages throughout!
Thank you, Robert! And yeah, I was worried 1400 words of suicide letter might be a bit much. I'll probably have to address that if/when I do a second draft, particularly if it reads like an info dump. But for now, we'll call it "proesy."
Proesy is an excellent word. That's always the dance for me in verse, the one between poetry and the prose. My thinking is: if Merle's backstory really is important to the story, then there will be time later on to unfold it and understand it better across the larger narrative. If it's not, and it's really just the catalyst for the protagonist's story, then we don't really need that much of it. But I love the overall idea of the story. A neo-western in blank verse is very compelling.
A great addition, Dan. As for the length of the letter, well, maybe you'll have to decide when you can see it in context to the whole? If you were planning on, say, 4 Cantos, then maybe it's a bit long, but for something Omeros-esque I don't think it'd be considered long at all.
Narratively, I think this is working out pretty well so far.
Thank you, James! I had to look up Omeros. I haven’t touched too many modern epic poems (only because i’ve primarily been a reader of prose-fiction). Do you recommend Omeros?
But yes, I think the letter and its length will be something I can only judge properly when I have completed the story. I don’t know that it will be quite so long as a Homerian epic, but I foresee the Cantos numbering somewhere in the double digits.
Well done Dan. The pacing and the tension when the twins from the bank come in kept me hooked. The backstory/exposition with the letter feels a bit dense. It feels at times more like straightforward prose. But there's a lot of great lines and passages throughout!
Thank you, Robert! And yeah, I was worried 1400 words of suicide letter might be a bit much. I'll probably have to address that if/when I do a second draft, particularly if it reads like an info dump. But for now, we'll call it "proesy."
Proesy is an excellent word. That's always the dance for me in verse, the one between poetry and the prose. My thinking is: if Merle's backstory really is important to the story, then there will be time later on to unfold it and understand it better across the larger narrative. If it's not, and it's really just the catalyst for the protagonist's story, then we don't really need that much of it. But I love the overall idea of the story. A neo-western in blank verse is very compelling.