No further resketch today; I was doing some work on a short fiction piece last night and briefly wanted to document my process.
- This is the same 'space wizards' piece I was talking about back in Oblique Reflections on a WIP Short Story. Specifically, I was working on point 5: Thematics.
- The story wasn't clicking for me. It was fine, but felt like a Set of Neat Things that Happened, or perhaps some fun action figures to play with, rather than something that was singing.
- Specifically, there was a disconnection between the main character and the events -- she was a bit 'along for the ride', I don't think the basis for her decisions were clear enough, and the ending didn't feel like a kind of inevitability when you got there.
- I think it just about worked, but I wanted it to do more than just 'work', hah.
- So I reworked some aspects of the MC's background. Not radically, to be honest -- mostly deepening/expanding on some threads that had come out while writing. This was 'off the page', in a notebook, just to figure things out.
- This also meant connecting more specifically with something else I was snagging on: a lack of clarity over what the story was really about, in terms of it's thematic core.
- On reflection, due to the deuteragonist and the story that unfolds, I realised it was really about the shapes the world fashions us into, and what it means to reject that.
- Specifically, the secondary character is a kind of weapon. Circumstances and the world have explicitly fashioned her as a weapon, and doesn't particularly want to be one.
- The main character's own background and arc (such as there was one) didn't really snick together with that. So I did the above to find ways that she could fit into place with that. How her own story was similar to and different from this other character's, in a way that would make sense of their relationship in the story.
- In some ways, it's less about making the MC's story connect with that other character's, and more about making it link back to the piece's thematic core. It just happens that the thematic core builds on this other character's story.
- Having figured out that in the abstract, I tried to block out some specific ways I could show that on the page without massive rewriting. There are some lighter options like background or 'cosmetic' details which point to it. Framing scenes in ways that help reveal it. And dramatising it through existing or new scenes.
- From this, I figured out a new scene that I think will really strengthen the piece and solve a separate pacing issue. (Ignoring for a moment that its wordcount is already well over where I want it to be.)
- But I want to get a lot of this information right up front for the reader, and this new scene wouldn't fit there. (Well, it could, but I think it would wreck momentum and pacing while undermining the value of the new scene.)
- So I broke out the current first scene (which I also thought wasn't pulling its weight and had flagged to collapse anyway) into its key functional points (starting to think in terms of Further heat-ravaged thinking about narrative units|sequences as narrative units), married that to the list of new thing I was hoping to accomplish and surface about the main character and the stakes for her, then reworked the scene.
- This meant some new writing and throwing some stuff out, but not too much.
- Now, I need to type that up and fettle it a little, before moving on to the next problem. I'm trying to avoid solutions that don't require lots of writing generation, particularly when I'm anticipating having to cut and throw out a bunch anyway, but this felt like the right move.
- I'll eventually have to simmer everything down a whole bunch. It's knocking on 6,000 words without the whole new scene, either. There's a bunch of loredumping I know can be thrown out, but if I want this thing to be good and also hopefully saleable, I want that wordcount to come down notably.