03.18.08

Undo/Rewrite: Ready Steady Go!

Posted in Rants, Shameless Self-Promotion, Writing at 4:31 am

I’ve come to the conclusion that Harvesting Blueberries is in dire need of a complete rewrite. This first draft is disjointed and unpolished, and unfortunately it spews plot threads faster than Lachesis’ berserk sewing machine. Most of those threads are dropped or ignored, and unfortunately the whole thing just winds up being somewhat bad. Not completely bad, and definitely not unsalvageable, but it does need to be re-evaluated from the very first moment. So, that’s the April project… and I’m going to treat it as another NaNo.

You might think that this would be a bad thing, given how much I’m looking forward to Tekkoshocon in the second week of April. But just remember that November had Thanksgiving in the middle, and that worked out okay. Besides, I’m going to give myself a head-start: I’m starting the writing on the last weekend in March, anyway; most likely the 28th.

To this end, I’m spending these two weeks in re-reading the story, identifying the flow of the plot, and actually compositing the plot threads into an overall narrative. (Oh, and gaming every once in a while, too. Can’t let the backlog get too far backed up.) What’s becoming the hardest part, really is making sure that I have an outline that works and that doesn’t get thrown out halfway through. I have the basic flow of the story done– that’s what the first draft was for. Now I have to cut the crap out and add in more of what’s good.

Another part of this is that I’m using a new piece of software, after having tinkered with it for a little bit. StoryMill turned out to be a pretty useful tool in giving me the overall view of the plot that I needed, and so I’m going to try using that for the full rewrite. If nothing else, it should help me with making sure I keep character details consistent– I honestly don’t recall what color Chloe’s hair is anymore. I’m also really digging the Timelines view. It has a bit of a learning curve– but then, what software doesn’t?– but it offers some tools that make working with it not just easier, but a genuine joy. And, as we’ve established with the Reclamation List and the Backlog List, I’m a numbers junkie and can’t seem to work very well without having some concrete measure of progress to show for it. (StoryMill is Mac-only, but I believe Pez had found a Windows program that accomplishes much the same thing– hopefully he will share its name and link with us.)

So, really, there’s three phases that need to be done. The first is to “import” the existing sequence of events into StoryMill so that I can make sure I have the general events together. Then, I need to devise a revised sequence of events and see how that impacts the plot– I already know one major thing that I’m going to change, and one plot thread that’s going to be picked up far earlier than it already is. Finally, I need to sit down and write this second draft, hopefully without requiring too much in the way of re-revising the plot. I expect to be done with Phase One by Easter.

Overall, and this is the harder part, I need to make the story far denser than it already is. Blueberries‘ first draft has huge swaths of text (tens of pages in some cases) where nothing pertinent to the plot happens, and all of the actual plot stuff is off-stage. I would say that it’s being done in the name of characterization, but it’s not– it was just stalling for time and words. Phillip (the protagonist) needs to take a more proactive approach; when I realized this in the original story, his action took the form of a letter. A good start, kinda, but just wasn’t enough. I need to speed him up there, and slow down the actions of another individual so that I’m not constrained that badly.

There are a handful of scenes in the first draft which are brilliant (in my opinion)– they really serve to highlight the characterizations and to give the reader a good sense of who these people are. That’s something I’m particularly proud of: this is the first story I’ve written where the characters feel far more alive than the scenery. More than that, really, they’re quite unconventional; the orphanage runner is a single man not even in his thirties yet, the high-powered executive is a young woman who doesn’t use her gender as a crutch, and the enforcer is a scrawny guy hiding behind sunglasses. Unfortunately, they got to be this in-depth at the expense of the plot’s adherence and coherence. So, there’s that problem solved: now that I know how the characters would react in these situations, I can plan ahead a bit more. One of my favorite parts of the draft actually affected the plot, and it’s perfect enough that it stands a very good chance of making it into this second go-around. It fits how the characters involved would react to the stimulus that prompted it, and it wasn’t forced or contrived. It then led very naturally into how the other characters would react, and so on and so forth. That’s one of the points where the characters seemed to stop resisting my attempts at forcing them into the plot and started flowing with it, started generating plot on their own. Good for the pace of writing and for inspiration; bad for sticking to an outline– I wound up writing by the seat of my pants for the last seventy-odd pages of the book.

So, rather than talk more about it, I figure it’s best to actually just, you know, do it. Ciao, folks.

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