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Posts Tagged ‘rewrites’

Mystery

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , on May 19, 2010| 2 Comments »

I’ve started the rewrite of THE IGNORED PROPHECY.  The revision is significant enough to call it a rewrite, I think, even though I’m mostly rearranging things I’ve already written.  There is some new material as well.  And quite a bit of what was there is being cut, too. 

And that makes me think about mystery and how to create it in a story, because THE IGNORED PROPHECY is at least partly a mystery.  At the end of THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, the main character had just come to terms with his own magical abilities–something he had tried to reject during most of the book.  Now, at the beginning of THE IGNORED PROPHECY, all kinds of strange things are happening to his magic, things he doesn’t seem to be in complete control of.  Some things are odd.  Others are disturbing.  And one scares him to death.  (Well, not literally.)  And he won’t find out what the causes of these phenomena are until the end of the book.

The last revision was pretty good (compared to where this one started out), but I need to increase the tension and up the stakes.  I also took pity on my protagonist and resolved (or at least proposed the correct solution for) one of the mysteries way too soon in the current version.  I’m trying to reorganize things so all of these strange things happen within a very short time.  This structure pushes the “big scary thing” a little further back, but hopefully lets me build up to it so that when it happens the main character is already off balance.

I’m going to have to employ some misdirection as well, to keep things from being resolved too quickly.  There was a little misdirection in the last version, but not nearly enough.  Then the answers should start coming during the last quarter of the book.  But, again, I need to try to arrange that so that answering one question just raises another or makes the remaining questions look more serious.

This mystery thing is harder than it looks.

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Beginnings

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , on March 22, 2010| Leave a Comment »

First, a little status.  I have cut 1000 words from THE SHAMAN’S CURSE and 2000 words from THE IGNORED PROPHECY.  And that was just yesterday.

You have to get the beginnings right.  Otherwise, nobody’s going to read the golden prose in the middle, the fantastic climax, or the awe-inspiring ending.  (Well, we hope the middle, climax, and ending are all those things, any way.)

I’m thinking about this today because I had the good luck to have someone read the first few new chapters of DREAMER’S ROSE before I got too far into it.  The good news is: it was interesting enough to read on.  The bad news is: the critiquer thought a side character was the protagonist and that the real protagonist was shallow.

Diagnosis:  I was rushing.  I was trying so hard to get to what I saw as the inciting incident quickly, that I was just skipping over a lot of territory.  So now I’m going back over those early chapters, expanding where appropriate, and improving my protagonist’s motivation for what he does.

Discussing the critique a little gave me the insight to realize that what I was seeing as the inciting incident was really part of the try/fail cycle (a failure).  The real life-altering event occurs much earlier.  I don’t have to rush and the story will be so much better for it.

I’m so fortunate to have found this out early.  You don’t want to be trying to build a 100,000 word edifice on quicksand.

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The Inner Editor

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , on March 19, 2010| 3 Comments »

As a writer, my inner editor is my best friend when I’m doing revisions.  But it can be a demon during a first draft.

For years, I started several things and never finished any of them.  I’d get five or ten or even fifty pages in and decide it was all garbage and start over.  Then I finally decided that was enough of that.  So, when I started THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, I made myself a rule: I couldn’t go back and change anything until I had finished the whole thing.  I could make notes in the margins about what I wanted to change, but I couldn’t actually edit anything until it was complete.  I probably only managed to stick to this rule because I wrote THE SHAMAN’S CURSE long hand in several spiral notebooks.  It’s just harder to go back and tweak things that way.  I only broke this rule twice, when it was obvious that I had gone down a false trail and the only way to move forward was to go back a little.

I’ve outgrown the spiral notebooks, but it looks like I might need to remind myself of that rule.  After writing about 6,500 new words, I’ve been stuck for several days on the new chapters for DREAMER’S ROSE. I know exactly why; I don’t like the last part I wrote.  There’s too much telling.  Either I need to find a way to show these things or they’re not important enough to keep.  Since they go to my antagonist’s personality and motives, I think they probably are important enough to show.  I just don’t have a good handle on the scenes to do that right now. 

So, the answer is, to remember that at least this part of the book is still a first draft.  I need to turn that little demon of an inner editor off, make a note, and just move on.  I can fix it in the revisions.  That’s what they’re for.

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Antagonists

Posted in writing, tagged , , on March 15, 2010| 2 Comments »

This topic came up today because I’ve been working on the first revision of DREAMER’S ROSE, which includes about ten new chapters at the beginning.  It feels very good to have the words flowing again after having been stuck on SEVEN STARS.  The new chapters also give me a chance to get a good look at my antagonist as a petulant teenager.  So, ultimately, even if I decide to go back to something closer to the first starting point, there’s no downside to writing this.

Especially because antagonists are just harder for me.  I have much more fun writing about the good guys, the protagonists.  Very often, in my first draft the bad guys are bad just because they are.  Even though I usually know what motivates them, it just doesn’t come through in the first draft.  So the antagonist is always something I pay particular attention to when I start the revisions.

In THE SHAMAN’S CURSE and THE IGNORED PROPHECY, the antagonists are motivated by revenge, one to the point of obsession, the other in a coldly calculating way.  The antagonist in BLOOD WILL TELL is actually trying to do the right thing, as he sees it, but in a horribly wrong way.  The villain in DREAMER’S ROSE (and this one is a villain) wants something but he’s not willing to pay the price to earn it, so he’s trying to steal it instead.  It gets more interesting when you realize that what he’s trying to steal is the power of a god–and he almost succeeds.

SEVEN STARS didn’t really have an antagonist.  There were some people who weren’t very nice who got in the way, but they weren’t truly antagonists.  So, there’s at least one insight into what may be wrong with that story and what I’ll need to do to fix it when I eventually go back to it.  No writing is ever wasted.  You always learn something.

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Rewrites

Posted in writing, tagged , , , on February 12, 2010| 1 Comment »

I actually don’t mind revisions.  I do my best to turn my internal editor off during the first draft, so I expect to have to do a round or two of revisions.  Expecially if I’m writing fast, some things may just get left out or need to be expanded.  I often need to give more depth to my antagonists than they get in the first draft.  There’s its own kind of reward in seeing the writing and the story grow and improve during revisions.  Kind of like gardening, I guess.  Pull the weeds, prune judiciously, plant something new every once in a while, water and fertilize the rest.

But rewriting, where I actually have to discard what I wrote and start over, is more painful.  That’s where I am with two of my novels, though.  I still really believe in these stories, so it’s worth the pain to try to get them right.

This week, I’ve been formulating a plan of attack for my first novel, THE SHAMAN’S CURSE.  (It’s not really my first novel, but we’re not going to talk about that thing under the bed, okay?  It is the first to be good enough to try to get it right and get it published some day.)

I reread it after a about a year.  It wasn’t as good as I remembered.  I still really like the second half or so and that, right there, tells me what the first problem is.  It takes too long to get there.  So, that’s my first task.  I want to cut 10,000 words from the first half–15,000 would be even better.   Then I’ll see how far that goes towards fixing some of the other porblems I saw.  Wish me luck.  This is going to hurt.

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