the r-word
Welcome, howdy, etc. This is the first of (I hope) many monthly progress reports where I detail what I’ve been working on, much in the way an insane man disgorges conspiracy at you while you wait for the bus.
Let’s get rambling.
War is Declared
That’s not directed at you, sit down. It’s a story about a fantasy warlord declaring war on an old lady that lives on a hill. How does she defeat an entire army? Good question, I have no idea. I’m about 6000 words into the first draft, but it’s been on hold since around halfway through the month.
I’ve realised lately that I’m the kind of person who thrives on hopping from project to project. It keeps things interesting. Though this was a pretty interesting project, I did begin to slow down about halfway through. I had an itch to work on something that would let me hone my underdeveloped revision skills. Which led to…
The Banker and The Sellswords
A renaissance fantasy story of a banker who gets robbed, enlists the robbers to attack a competitor he’s in debt to, and everything that spirals downward from there. I finished the first draft in October 2024 at about 6000 words. I did try to revise it at the time but, being an unpracticed reviser, I got overwhelmed. The culmination of my efforts were a few line edits, instead of the yummy structural changes that make a story really pop.
I picked it back up about halfway through February with a new revising method and have gotten about 7000 words into the second draft. I expect to finish at around 22,000 words. Yes, it’s a lot, but it’s not novel length. And good lord am I happy about that.
But let’s talk about that new revising method.
Revision
If you look through any of my stories, you’ll probably see that they feel very first draft. And… yeah. With very few exceptions (Other than some basic line editing for Tandy and Danton), my standard procedure has been to write a story straight through and then drop it like a newborn through the hands of the sweatiest doctor.
The problem is that I burn out too quick on revision. There’s something about my brain that makes it difficult to fit the entire structure of a story in my head as I’m reading. I get too overwhelmed by all the little line-by-line mistakes and quickly give up. But as I was working on The Banker and T… Christ alive why did I give it such a long name. Let’s just call it TBaTS. As I was working on TBaTS, it hit me:
What about an outline?
Wait, come back. I know what I said about outlines in my previous post. HOWEVER, that was more about outlining a story to death before starting. This, on the other hand, is a post-first-draft outline. I take the story and note only the most salient plot points of each chapter.
Example: The prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring (the movie) could be written like:
- Narration explaining ring
- Sauron defeated, ring taken
- Isildur takes ring, gets killed, ring lost
And that’s it. It lets me see the broader plot without getting bogged down in the nitty gritty. And once I’m done, I can take any issues I find and create a much improved outline to use for the second draft.
Not that it’s entirely painless (Again, I managed to more than triple the size of TBaTS), but it means I have a proper framework to hang a story on.
And here’s that revision framework:
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Drop a steaming mess
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Create outline out of mess
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Create more coherent outline
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Make more structurally sound draft (TBatS is here)
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Clean chapter structure, characterisation, and prose
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Cut 10% across the board
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Line edits
It’s a lot, I know, but I think it’ll create a more cohesive and higher quality story. I guess we’ll see by next month if it actually works.
Prose
Another problem that I’m trying to rectify is actually a weird one. About a year ago, I got it in my head that I should NEVER use narration to tell a story. All a story needs is action and dialogue, right? That way I can do the most showing and the least telling anyone’s ever seen.
No, bad Scott. It turns out that when you ignore one of prose’s biggest strengths (Conveying the inner world of a character in an immersive way) you’re actually making a story worse and also full of piss (Generally. No hard and fast rules of writing and all that).
Instead of using a character’s anger to reveal more about their internal conflicts, I had a lot of, “Cool Dog clenched his fists,” type passages to convey anger. And all that does is serve to make a story’s voice stiff and awkward.
This came to a head when I re-read Game of Thrones and discovered, to my horror, that GRRM extensively narrates the history of the world as it pertains to the characters’ histories, and it kicks ass.
I want to kick ass, and I’m starting to make tentative punts in that direction, but baby steps (kicks).
Unnamed Star Wars ripoff science fiction story
I finally beat Star Wars Battlefront II (2005, the good one) after 15 years of owning it and, man, it really tells the story of the prequels better than the prequels ever did. Yes, I know, dead horses and all that, but it really does.
For the unaware, the story campaign is of the 501st Legion of the Clone Army presented by way of short narration segments. Something about it really interested me, and what would stop me making my own fall of a galactic republic story?
You?
Disney’s legal team?
I don’t think so.
It’s early prewriting/worldbuilding stuff so far but it’s an idea I’m really attached to. It feels like it could be a fun long project to work on. I’m still firm in saying that I don’t want to write any novel-length projects for the moment, but as soon as I’m ready again this’d be one I’d love to jump into.