Since revision this time digs right into the foundation structure of NewBook, a post on where the revision is at the moment seems a good time to discuss the kinds of problems a book’s underpinnings or foundation–the deeper structure–can have, and strategies for fixing\u00a0 same.\u00a0\u00a0 This is not a problem I have often, but it’s the one that’s plagued me since the concussion.\u00a0\u00a0 As additional reading for this topic (in case any of you are incubating a book, and also like Dorothy L. Sayers’ writing),\u00a0 see if a library near you has a copy of The Mind of the Maker by Sayers, itself an interesting (to me, at least) discussion\u00a0 of the doctrine of the Trinity as having particular relevance to creativity.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Within that book is a section on “Scalene Trinities” which accurately describes a number of problems of written works within the above framework.\u00a0\u00a0 You don’t, of course, need to accept the theology to use the insights into problems with writing.<\/p>\n
Two alpha readers and my agent all spotted the same problem with NewBook–it just happened, or occurred, in a series of incidents or situations connected to each other only loosely by sequence and the continuing characters (familiar, but no more than that.)\u00a0 The three said it differently, but what they said boiled down to “interesting, fun to read, but not going anywhere.”\u00a0\u00a0 Reworking an episodic book into a book with a strong through-line\u00a0 is, I’m finding, much harder than wielding the chain-saw of correction to prune away excess verbiage obscuring the action, or even untangling sequential errors.\u00a0 Always before, I’ve known where a story was going even when I didn’t know how it was going to get there.\u00a0\u00a0 It does no good to let the reins of your story-pony drop on its neck if your story pony has no more idea than you which way “home” is.\u00a0\u00a0 You’ll just wander from clump of grass to a creek for a drink, and uphill following the smell of a different grass.”<\/p>\n
I knew my plot daemon wasn’t aboard the ship at the beginning –the whatever-he-is part of my brain that up until February 2018 took care of the books’ foundation in the guise of Colin Glencannon, the engineer of the Inchcliffe Castle <\/em>in Guy Gilpatric’s books.\u00a0\u00a0 He showed up much later, absent-minded and pale, and neglected to tell me he hadn’t looked at the first 2\/3 of NewBook.\u00a0\u00a0 He had a larger lump on his head than I had on mine.\u00a0 So instead of trusting that the plot logic was in good hands and looking instead for the usual fossils, missing transitions, character breaks, and so on, I’ve been spending hours looking into all the options available for getting from Beginning to End.\u00a0\u00a0 Oh, and figuring out WHICH End best fits this book’s existing episodes so I don’t have to spend another year and a half in it.<\/p>\n A recent one shows how confusing it can be in the doing, and yet (afterwards) how necessary and logical and, um, obvious it is that it was needed.\u00a0 Early on (not first or second chapter, but early-ISH) there was a dramatic Bump-in-the-Night event with Ky seeing a military-ish answer, and ending with a bunch of people tied up on the front porch.\u00a0 Ky thought it was fun, getting in some action after those years as the white-clad Academy Commandant.\u00a0\u00a0 But that section had problems, and does not now exist.\u00a0\u00a0 The action bits were reasonably sound but they didn’t fit.\u00a0 With something like that early in the book, it needed to connect soon and solidly to one of the main drivers of the book and it didn’t.\u00a0\u00a0 It was reminiscent, in the wrong way, of the attack on Rafe’s bookstore\/stationery shop on Allray in the first series.\u00a0 Early in the revision process I took it out to see how things flowed without it.\u00a0 They flowed, all right, for too long without anything much happening.\u00a0 So a Bump in the Night might happen but not *that* bump.\u00a0\u00a0 Finding the right Bump on the right Night took awhile, but it’s much better now.<\/p>\n But subsequently, and without the wrong Bump, I began to see that the character development I wanted wasn’t happening (something else mentioned by the early readers) because…because…Oh.\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Of course.\u00a0\u00a0 Ongoing through at least six of the previous Vatta books is the question of Ky and Rafe’s future.\u00a0 In the Vatta’s War books, he is given enough space for the presence\u00a0 he’s meant to be–a person with his own tangled past, with his change in response to Ky as they travel together and to his\u00a0 *his* family’s peril, his late maturing–and then in NewBook he practically vanished from Point of View sections, and turned bland.\u00a0 Rafe?\u00a0 Bland<\/em>?\u00a0 Ky’s character had returned to my head, but Rafe’s had not, not until I re-read not just the last two books, but the earlier ones, reminding myself of everything that made him what he is.\u00a0 Locked into the steam tunnel as a scared pre-teen with Gary, the senior bully, among other things.\u00a0 I’d forgotten a lot about Rafe.\u00a0 Yeah, he “gets” the twins even better than Ky.\u00a0 So I’ve looked for places to give him the lead, make him the point-0f-view character, seeing Ky from his vantage, showing us his reaction to whatever side of her is uppermost.\u00a0 What brings them together, what’s held them so far, is not “well-roundedness” but spikyness, not the round smoothness of a ping-pong ball but the painful spikes of a sweet-gum ball (helps if you know North American trees.<\/p>\n Christmas afternoon and yesterday I was working on a section (I think it’s chapter 7, not sure)\u00a0 in which Ky is having a long conversation with an Important Person (in the IP’s mind.)\u00a0 Originally written from her POV entirely, it now looked wooden (the IP has a tendency toward wooden) as well as too long. \u00a0 It had occurred to me that having Rafe part of the conversation might help.\u00a0 But why would he?\u00a0 And would the IP even want\/allow him there?\u00a0 He wasn’t a witness to what the conversation was about.\u00a0 Hm.\u00a0 So he’s somewhere else, doing something else.\u00a0 And it’s Rafe, the sneak, the expert…ah, yes.\u00a0 Of course he’s bugged the room the conversation is in.\u00a0 And he’s responding to what he sees and hears–both the IP’s attempts to intimidate and manipulate Ky, and Ky’s handling of the IP.\u00a0 What will that mean for his hopes for a long-term relationship?<\/p>\n To the extent this book involves their relationship as they finally (it looks like) will have enough time together to make plans and carry some of them out, Rafe’s interior self needs to be more visible to readers.\u00a0\u00a0 What is he thinking, not just about Ky but about her family, about Slotter Key instead of Nexus II and other places he’s lived, about living on a planet v. moving around on a spaceship, about their responsibility (what would be their responsibility if they got hitched) to the twins, about his own future place in his own head?\u00a0\u00a0 And that’s best shown in POV sections.<\/p>\n Tonight’s little flashlight of inspiration is that the whole terraformer question (who?\u00a0 when?\u00a0 why?)\u00a0 doesn’t have to fit in a novel or novel group…it will fit in a short story or novella at most.<\/p>\n Back to connecting the story’s skeleton and replacing any missing parts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since revision this time digs right into the foundation structure of NewBook, a post on where the revision is at the moment seems a good time to discuss the kinds of problems a book’s underpinnings or foundation–the deeper structure–can have, and strategies for fixing\u00a0 same.\u00a0\u00a0 This is not a problem I have often, but it’s Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,29,10,5],"tags":[30,7,21],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-progress","category-revision","category-the-writing-life","category-vatta","tag-revision","tag-the-writing-life","tag-vatta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":694,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions\/694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}