Category Archives: plotting

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It’s too easy

I don’t mean writing is too easy, because it most certainly isn’t. Perhaps for others it is, though I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered a serious writer who has claimed it was. No, what’s too easy is the challenge facing my main character. Not in the overall quest, that’ll be hard enough, and long. It will take him to the very corners of the world. That conflict drives the story as a whole. What I’m referring to is the challenge facing the principle characters who must go from one place to another inside of a chapter.

The setting: A haunted road, seldom travelled in hundreds of years, over-grown and dangerous. This place should be filled with all manner of evil things. When I’d first written it, my characters simply left point A and made it, with little difficulty, to point B along this road. Only once they reach their destination do they encounter any sort of trouble, and it has nothing whatever to do with the haunted road. I didn’t start by thinking it was too easy. In fact, I started by thinking: ‘What purpose does any sort of encounter along this road serve? After all, one of these characters nearly died on the same road not three chapters back.‘

If it hadn’t been for such a big deal being made of the dangers along the road earlier in the book (there’s that word again – still feels like this story doesn’t deserve that label just yet), it might be that a brief account of getting from A to B might be adequate. However, that’s not the case, and even if I didn’t have this haunted road, I’d still have the threat of being caught by the ‘bad guy’. So, I really don’t have a choice but to add some sort of difficult situation along the road before they get to point B. It doesn’t matter that a major problem awaits the characters there. Having come to the conclusion I’ve got to add this bit anyhow, whatever I have these characters face needs to push the story forward in some way. I don’t think it should just be an interesting side-show (Although this can totally be done, and work well).

My approach, in this case, will aim to accomplish a few things. First off, the reader will be expecting the road to be bad, and when something horrible pops out of the woods, it’ll meet expectations. I will also be able to describe some seriously evil creatures, in action, which are referred to later. Meaning I don’t have to describe it in dialogue when I get to later, plus it will help with explanation of the difficulty the other character had, with less effort. The altercation should provide a platform for some explanation of history, though I’m going to limit this to prevent an information dump situation. Finally, I want it to help paint a picture for future events along the same road, especially if I’m in a position of describing any of those second hand.

Perhaps the main take-away for me in thinking about my current issue, and this rubber-ducking session to work it out, is every story has at least a few things along the path from A to B which weren’t essential to the telling. Those events exist because they happened along the way, and they’re interesting. After all, it’s a story good enough for the retelling because of the all of the crazy things that happened. Thinking about it from a purely story-teller perspective, the best stories you tell your friends always have something like: ‘And then J.D. got punched in the **** by a 10-year old right there in front of everyone.‘ Which may, or may not, be relevant to the key events of the story, but are present in the retelling just to illustrate the epic-ness of that story.

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The end is in sight

The actual end is not in sight, but I can see how to get there now. I’ve still got 5-6 chapters do draft from scratch before I land at a point where the action resolves for this story and sets up for the second part of the story (this project is planned to be a multi-part series, I’ve got a chapter 1 drafted already for the next part).

I spent the last two writing days (maybe 5 hours total?) re-working a few chapters that have been drafted for a long while and haven’t undergone significant revision yet. The last of these chapters was split into two, it should have been that way from the beginning, and that second half now needs to be almost completely re-done, and possibly split into a 3rd chapter. When I went to bed last night I put myself in the shoes of the main character, trying to figure out what to do. Needless to say, it took forever to fall asleep, and now I don’t remember half of what I’d come up with. On the bright side, I remember a few of the key elements I was thinking about, which will go on my story-line note cards, as soon as I remember where I stuck them. What I mostly remember though is that the last of those scenes could make for an intense fight. So, all I’ve got to do is get my characters to that point, and from this vantage it seems almost easy, except for the part where I’ve got to dredge up time to focus on it. Of course, then comes the hard part – revision and polishing.

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Rewriting the first chapter

Great, now I’ve got to rewrite the first chapter. The driver of the whole story as it’s written so far. Do I just trash the whole thing? Yes, I think I have to, maybe I can keep a little bit.

This is where I was a couple of months ago. It sucked. 15 chapters drafted, and I realized that the first chapter may have launched the action, but didn’t fit with the rest of the story. (At this point a professional writer might say: How is that even possible? – Well it is for me, because I’m not a pro.) That chapter started life as a bit of back-story for a supporting character. The idea was a tragic and secret love-story to explain his motivations. I had a lot of attempts to get my story going and I had characters and a general story arc, just not a good starting point. All I needed was a place I could launch the action that needed to happen. When I made the decision to swap the supporting character for the main character in that first bit of back-story, doors opened. I had motivation for the main character, a way to introduce the antagonist and an excellent introduction to the world.

From that first chapter, the second, third, and fourth chapters came easily. They were horrid the first go around, and I spent a lot of time rewriting them. I like them now, and liked them a couple of months ago. At that point I was ready to share the work, and the immediate feedback was that first chapter was good, but the story of it didn’t really fit with the direction of the rest of the story. In order to make it work, I would either have to expand chapter 1 into at least one more chapter and change significant plans for the main character in the future, or do something different. The conclusion I came to is that I had to scrap that first chapter. Well, that dropped me into a lurch. The action after just didn’t go and those subsequent chapters didn’t make a lot of sense without a launch point significantly similar to the original first chapter.

After throwing a tantrum for a while about having to throw away what had amounted to weeks of writing time – which translates into years for me given all of my other commitments – I spent some thinking about the problem, and managed to find a suitable revision. It was still a complete re-write, but it kept all of the key plot elements necessary to move the action forward. In fact, as far as story structure goes, it’s better. The style of that first chapter is more like the rest now (which was a related problem I’d been struggling with), the introduction of the main character was generally better, and the conflict I was trying to explain seemed to make more sense. The best part of this revision is that it didn’t require huge changes to subsequent chapters. However, there is a major drawback – the first chapter as it is now still needs a lot of revision and polishing. It’s nothing I can’t deal with though.

This experience has taught me an important lesson, one that I should already know: If most of the plot is working, there is no reason you shouldn’t be able to rewrite major portions (all?) of early chapters and still salvage the majority of the writing.