Breakthrough

Katin, Katin, Katin... I've just nailed down how she develops through the end of the novel. And in doing so, I realized something about how I wrote this novel, that I will hopefully rectify going forward:

I really, really enjoy writing prose. I do not, so much, enjoy structuring story and character development. It's difficult and painful, and I spend a lot of time feeling slightly nauseous and wondering how I'm going to get myself out of this jam. A lot of times, the way out means destroying what you've created and starting over. After doing that for the last couple of hours, I've gotten a solid sense of where the character of Katin should go, and how she should develop, and how her dramatic flaws should manifest.

The tricky part is, when tomorrow I reread the notes I wrote today, there's a chance that I will spot obvious glaring problems. Then I will feel nauseous again as I have to wade through figuring out, once more, exactly how Katin is going to progress as a character.

I spent a lot of the last six months writing prose and doing world-building. What I did not do nearly enough of was nailing down the characters. It can help to write an exploratory draft, to get some ideas about things that can happen; but nothing in there should be gospel. Break it apart, and save those ideas to reuse later somewhere that they fit. Meanwhile, go nail down the characters, who are (and should be) what drive the story.

I had a long phone call with a friend the other day. He's read the entire second draft of the novel, and he made a lot of very good points, a lot of which boiled down to me realizing that I hadn't really done my due diligence of nailing down the story and character progression. I kept telling myself the novel was pretty good as-is, which is probably the case (people seem to like my prose), but good prose doesn't make a good story.

And that brings me to another danger of, specifically, handing out sample chapters to people: A sample chapter does not contain enough material for people to judge your character and story skills, only your prose. I've posted versions of chapter 2 and chapter 5 on Mythic Scribes, and in both cases everyone has praised the prose, but looking at the story as a whole, there's a lot more work to be done. At least at this point, I'm confident that my writing is an easy read, even if it doesn't quite add up to what it should.

Character analysis

So here's something else I'm really bad at: Analyzing the state of my characters and determining if their progression actually makes any sense, or is any good.

I just rewrote a chapter yesterday that involved one character taking a trek through a city, in order to return home after escaping a dire event. The first thousand words of the chapter detailed her trek home, and not a single damn one of them talked about her state of mind, feelings about the traumatic event that had happened to her, what she wanted, or what she felt. I rewrote that section, shortening 1,008 words to 716, by removing and combining several redundant, superfluous descriptions (no, I did not need to say three different ways that people looked at her oddly because her dress was filthy), as well as adding a few character moments, where she expresses new emotions that are a result of her recent trauma.

I'm very proud of myself for realizing this on my own; I've been getting great feedback from a friend, and he's pointed out a number of places where characters (especially this one) have had some traumatic event occur and yet they appear to have no emotional reaction to it. (They do change later on, but the tipping-point moment of change isn't supported by earlier events.) So it was kind of nice to recognize this problem on my own.

Nonetheless, I tend to assume that what I've written characters doing has to be in there. It's difficult to look at an existing action and analyze it objectively: Is this what that character would really do? Is this conflicting with or contradictory to something else they did earlier? Does this action move them toward their goal?

What I really need, I think, is a checklist sorta dealie to help me go through character moments and identify whether they're working properly. Not because a checklist will never miss anything, but because I find that I don't even ask these basic questions when I'm rereading my work. If I can get in the habit of doing this kind of analysis instinctively (and man, it's tedious), it'll end up making my work that much better.

Everyone's Too Nice

Yet another in the long line of problems that are likely to crop up in my writing is that Everyone Is Too Damn Nice. Characters who are friends never get in arguments, or if they do, it's a minor quibble that lasts three lines and then they're best buds again.

In real life, good friends don't get in fierce arguments a lot, but in a story, they've got to. Their friendship needs to be tested just as much as they individually need to be tested by the trials thrown at them by the story. I had a chapter that features something astonishing happen, and at the end, the main character said, "Well, that was exciting. I'm going to bed now."

Yeah. Dumb. Now, she and her best friend get in a huge argument and it doesn't end with them reconciling; the chapter ends with them being pissed off at each other. (Doesn't help that one of them is the servant of the other.) Tension! Drama! Character development! It was a missed opportunity, and thanks to some excellent feedback, it was identified and made better. I'm just hoping that some day I get to the point where I can always identify weak spots like that myself, instead of being so close to the material that I assume that because I wrote it that way once, it always has to be that way.

Reintegration and Details

I finished the second draft. Now I'm working on the prologue and first four chapters again, integrating some backstory changes and trying to make sure other details are present.

This is a pain in the ass.

Scattered across these five chapters are various pieces of information, some of which are important, some of which turn out not to be so. I put them in early on, thinking they'd be relevant later, but that's not how it turned out. And while interesting world details are, er, interesting, if they don't inform the story, they can actually harm it by being present.

The barbaric tribal nation to the north is something I find interesting, but it doesn't actually come up much during the story, and so it's a bad idea to present details about that nation that are not relevant to the plot or the characters. It's just distracting. Readers will think it's important, and it never turns out to be important, and it's not clearly part of a scene-setting.

For example, a character arrives in a new city, and is passing through an open-air market. You have a scene like this (off the top of my head):

Ralyn gazed out across the bazaar. She saw shaven-headed Irtoks, in their polished black mail; there was a trio of Grendul, arguing fiercely and slapping each other on the chests. Vendors kept their heads down whenever a Thorn Caller passed by, singing his terrible dirge.

Irtoks, Grendul, and Thorn Callers don't ever need to come up again in the story, because this is just giving a sense of the place where Ralyn (who is presumably a main character) currently is.

Compare with this passage:

Ralyn listened to the lords debating. They spoke of the Ashkadar, the barbarians in the northern mountains, and whether they might try to invade the green lands to the south again. Ashkadar were fierce fighters; growing up in a frozen wasteland meant only the strongest survived.

Unless these "Ashkadar" show up later, that last sentence is irrelevant padding. Ralyn is not in the frozen north, she is not going to run into any Ashkadar. Even if she knows this detail about the Ashkadar, relating it to the reader is not really a good idea.

Yes, there are some readers who don't mind plowing through loads of extra, irrelevant details, because they're fascinated by the details per se. But it doesn't make for a stronger story. And it's not the way I want to write. And yet I find myself writing that way a lot, because I'm pretty much making it all up as I go along. An interesting detail will occur to me, and I'll just put it in on the fly.

The hard part isn't recognizing these irrelevant details later on; the hard part is making myself delete them.

Another problem is being too vague about important details. I tend to be too oblique; I don't like stating facts outright, even if important. I prefer to integrate them organically.  But what happens is that the details end up sounding like elaborations on things that were stated earlier. The reader ends up thinking "Did I miss something?"

The hardest part about all this is keeping track of which details are where. Did I mention and reinforce the idea that Ashkadar raiders are incredibly fierce and brutal? Mentioning it once in chapter 1, when the raiders don't show up until chapter 15, means that some readers will have completely forgotten that detail by the time the Ashkadar show up.

But at the same time, overdoing it is a problem. Readers will notice, and say, "Geez, we get it, the Ashkadar are fierce warriors."

(This isn't even a "show, don't tell" problem. If the characters have heard all their lives that the Ashkadar are fierce, then having the characters think about how fierce the Ashkadar are is fine, as long as it gets shown at some point.)

THIS. CLOSE.

I am an hour or two's worth of work from finishing Draft #2. I already know some tweaks I need to make for Draft #3; I'm really hoping I can get that all done inside of a week (I have some time off from my day job coming up) and then it's onto the polish/artwork/design phase.

Then it'll be time to put this sucker live, and start marketing the hell out of it.

Sudden clarity

So I was thinking about the novel this morning, and I realized out of the blue that I almost certainly need to rewrite the first four chapters. Not only that, but I think I also realized how to do it.

It was weird, because I've gotten some feedback about the early part of the book that made me think about whether it needed rewriting, or just tightening up. But no, I think I need to start over with them.

Well, shit.

The rewriting continues

As much as I'd love to post here frequently, what time I have to spend writing, I'm working on the novel. Which means I can't spend time writing here. Alas.

Things will improve eventually...

The Last Third

The first two thirds of the novel had been written and rewritten a couple of times. As a result, they were much more polished, and made much more sense; better story structure, character development, better thought-out elements.

I just got back into the last third of the novel, which has all had exactly one pass. I keep finding entire chapters that don't really make sense because they weren't predicated on a rigorous analysis of what the characters would do, how they would react, etc. And also a lot of them were light on conflict. Things happen, but there was little danger, little conflict, a lot of users going from point A to point B.

On the one hand, it's painful to have to commit to the idea of throwing out three or four entire chapters because they don't make sense. On the other hand, it's a good feeling knowing that you're making something much better than before.

The end is in sight, but only if I use a telescope.

The Slog

Rewriting is a slog. Somehow I feel like I have less free time than I did when I was writing the first draft. Probably just a figment of my imagination, but maybe the kids really are sucking up more of my time than they used to.

Actually, part of it is sleep. When I was writing the FD, I'd stay up till 1 or 2 many nights, just writing for a few hours all by myself (kids, wife in bed). Lately, I'm having trouble staying up that late. I get really sleepy by midnight and just have to hit the hay.

I've revised 12 of 34 chapters so far, in the two weeks or so since I finished the first draft. The book is about 2,000 words shorter. So another month, probably, to finish this revision pass. Then I'll read through the entire thing, stem to stern, and make notes along the way about what needs to change, and do another pass. With luck, I should be ready to move into the publishing phase by the end of the year. (Gotta get a cover painted; I recently met an artist who lives nearby and his style looks perfect for what I envision.)

The Rewrite Shuffle

Right now I'm doing a world-building pass on the novel, to make sure that all the relevant elements of the world are explored in enough detail (but not too much; I don't want them getting in the way of the story and characters, I just want institutions and historical facts and other details mentioned at least once before they become relevant later on).

But I can't stop myself from editing the prose along the way. I realize that the presentation of information about the story world is affected by the words used to present them, so maybe that's part and parcel and I should just embrace it; at the same time, I feel like work done to make the prose tighter is wasted, because it could all change later on (due to some story element).

And yet, I can't help it. If I turn on read-only mode on the document, I end up just reading and not analyzing. But the editing process takes much longer if I'm constantly stopping to adjust word choice.

Perhaps it would be helpful to go through the novel and write a scene list, with information about what details are presented where, to give an overview of the story. Then I would be able to analyze the world-building elements without getting caught up in the prose. That just sounds really time-consuming, and I'm not sure it would lead to a better outcome in the long run. There's also the fact that whenever I change anything in the text, I'd have to change the outline as well to stay in sync with it. And I've already got a good grasp on what world-building details are where.

Arse.

First draft completed

Last night around 00:15 I completed the first draft of my novel in progress. 164,396 words in the draft, although considerably more words were written along the way (five chapters were rewritten from scratch, and numerous other small edits were made along the way, of course). It was 87 days since I started the novel, on the evening of July 22, for an average of 1,889 words per day, which I'm quite happy with considering that I can only work on it for at most two or three hours a day, on a good day.

This is the longest piece of writing I've ever completed. The tiny demons of self-doubt made a few sallies during that time, but I managed to suppress them. However this is only the first draft (well, the prologue and chapters 1-4 are on their second full drafts... actually, so is chapter 23, come to think of it, which I wrote from the wrong character's POV the first time around).

Now the hard part begins: rewriting chapters 5-32 and the epilogue from scratch again, incorporating all the new developments I came up with along the way. There's entire organizations I invented for background, who aren't mentioned until 2/3 of the way through now (because that's when I came up with them), and they need to be integrated into the story, for the sake of world-building and flavor. I'm pretty happy with the main story and character development, and it ends in a good place: this is the first novel in a planned trilogy.

Rewriting entire chapters from scratch is painfully difficult, but it is necessary. Once I've got all the story beats in place properly, the final phase will be to go over the prose with a fine-toothed comb, making sure it flows, and that every paragraph, sentence, and line of dialogue is as compact and interesting as possible. 164k words is a lot longer than the average novel, as I understand it, but I don't think there's any unnecessary elements. (Although I'm sure I'll come across some as I'm rewriting.) There are, however, quite a lot of elaborations on things that could stand to be trimmed down.

The Lure of Editing

Hello, world.

Editing is alluring. On the one hand, it's highly satisfying to go back and strip my prose down to the fewest number of words that can convey what I want to convey. Removing redundancies, choosing more precise adjectives, and grinding that paragraph down to a hard, diamond core is a nice feeling.

On the other hand... that's the very last thing I should be doing. It's a necessary step, yes, but it's still the very last step. It's a lot easier to attack a single paragraph and make it good, than it is to examine my story as a whole and realize that an entire 5,000-word chapter—or several—needs to be discarded, or rewritten from scratch, or (worst of all) moved to another point in the story and then partially rewritten. It's surgery of the mind, and it's terrifyingly difficult.

Distancing myself from declaring every first attempt "pretty good" is one of the fundamentals of good writing. My first attempts aren't any good. No one's is, except by occasional happenstance. Once I commit myself to the idea that writing is rewriting, that when I write a chapter for the first time I should wait a week, come back, and write it again from scratch without referencing the first pass... only then have I taken the first step.

And of course, just because I was able to do it once, doesn't make it any easier the next time.