Update: one step back, one step forward

So, I was getting annoyed at the thought of a tiny bit of revision I knew I was going to need to do EVENTUALLY, and last week I got annoyed enough about this that I paused to do a fast revision/trimming pass through the whole story from the third chapter onward. (The first two chapters are peachy and I left them alone.)

The basic thing is, I’m working with a lot of characters (I’m sure you’re not surprised), and while initially I had brought in a named character who has been referred to in other books, with the intention of developing this character, I eventually decided I have more than enough going on without her. Therefore, I took her out of the story completely. Sorry, but there goes a neat female character who could have been important. Maybe we’ll see her later, somewhere else, but not here.

This sort of thing is pretty tedious. Judging from past experience, she’s probably still there in one or two references that I will hopefully catch later. As a plus, removing a character requires quite a bit of re-reading, which makes a good time to do some sentence-level trimming. So I cut 7000 words (not even half what I would have liked to cut, by the way).

Then I referred to my accumulated notes about things to tweak and went back and forth through the manuscript, adding bits, tweaking, and removing those notes. I’m taking about notes that go, basically, “Someone needs to have a conversation about xxxxx so that xxxxx doesn’t come out of nowhere in chapter 15. In fact, it would be best to refer to xxxxx at least twice before chapter 15.” So then I go back and forth looking for good places to put the right kind of conversational mentions of xxxxx. I’m not necessarily trying to be super subtle. I’m pointing at xxxxx with considerable emphasis so the reader will notice it. But in a way that seems natural, obviously, not with any character thinking, “I bet xxxxx will probably be important!” Readers should feel that without any character needing to be nearly that explicit. That’s the aim.

Anyway, then I started moving forward again, winding up chapter 14 and moving forward with chapter 15, and here we are, with xxxxx appearing almost immediately. I actually thought we might get farther into the starlit lands before xxxxx became important, but nope, we have barely had time to look around and think how pretty the glowing flowers are and boom, there it is! This is actually a scene I had in mind from the beginning, I just needed to set it up more clearly.

It’s always fun to write a scene I’ve already imagined in detail. This is true even though the actual details change a lot, generally. A lot of the dialogue and details do remain just as they are in my head.

Also, I believe I will now be able to begin cutting down on characters. I will probably need to do that more later (and, a lot later, I will need to do it a lot more, but probably not until the next book after this). Anyway, cutting down on characters is always helpful. Someday I will write something with ONE character on stage, such as Castle Behind Thorns by Merrie Haskell, for example, and that will present a wholly different challenge that is presented from having a lot of important characters in a crowd.

Anyway, the upshot of last week is that I dropped 7000 words and added 7000 words and now I’m just about exactly back where I started in terms of wordcount, but this bit of annoying trivial revision is now behind me and I’m more comfortable about moving forward.

And now I’m going to find out a lot about the starlit lands …

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