I spent most of yesterday re-reading what I’d written on the abandoned book, as well as my notes on the project. I found some notes about what I wanted to do in revision that I must have made before I put this project aside, but the weird thing is, I don’t remember making these notes. They’re in my handwriting, so I must have, and they’re even legible, so it’s not as though I was writing in my sleep, or anything like that.

The nice thing is, they’re good ideas. They somewhat alter the plot of the book, but that’s what I need to do right now. When I eliminate all the stuff that has to go, I’ll need more action and conflict to throw in to replace it.

Meanwhile, there are key character traits I seem to have forgotten about. They’re supposed to be a big issue for the heroine, but they fall away after the first chapter.

Sometimes writing is like juggling. You have a lot of balls to keep in the air — character traits, aspects of the world, interpersonal conflicts, big-picture conflicts, and all of that is for multiple characters. Remembering to use all these things can be difficult because when you focus on one thing, you forget that other thing until you get halfway through the book and realize that your heroine’s key character trait hasn’t made an appearance in the last few chapters because she’s been busy dealing with other things.

And then sometimes you surprise yourself and find things that you didn’t plan but that come together. In this book, I seem to have had an unconscious theme of proving yourself. The heroine’s issue is that she wants to prove that she can do something. One of the secondary characters is worried about proving himself worthy. And the villain is trying to show the world what he can do. His intentions aren’t actually evil. He’s just enough of a narcissist that it doesn’t occur to him that the things he’s doing so he’ll look like a great hero will actually harm a lot of innocent people. Now that I’m aware this is there, I can work with it on purpose.

I took the week off from blogging last week because there was the holiday and then I went to visit my parents. Now I’m back to a “normal” work schedule, trying to get back to a regular routine after deadlines and travel.

It’s been more than a month since I even looked at the book I was working on before I had to switch gears and work on revisions. That made it pretty obvious the parts I needed to fix. I already had a feeling what the problem would be when I listened to my playlist/soundtrack for this book as I drove back from my parents’ house and realized that the first half of it was songs relating to the opening of the book. It’s nearly a two-hour drive, and I’d barely reached anything representing the main action by the time I got home.

Sure enough, when I was re-reading it this morning I saw that the story didn’t really kick in until about chapter five or six (aside from the inciting incident at the end of chapter one — there was way too much transition from there to the main action). At first, the scenes that seemed unnecessary didn’t look that long, just a few paragraphs, and those also worked for worldbuilding. Then I did a word count and realized that we were talking about a couple of pages each time (for my first draft, I don’t have it set up to show me pages). And the worldbuilding was for the part of the world the heroine’s leaving, so it was all unnecessary for the reader understanding the story.

So, the first thing to do on this round is cut all that stuff. Then I need to figure out what really needs to be happening to move the story forward. I love the part of the world the heroine’s from and I wouldn’t mind living there, but that’s not what the story’s about. It’s about her leaving that comfort zone and going to a place that’s more challenging to her. I can always write short pieces set in her home area later, but that’s not what this book is about.

One of the sessions I went to at last weekend’s conference was on structuring a series. My main takeaway from that is that it’s important to find a good balance between a series being connected enough that people will want to read all the books and there being enough “on ramps” to allow new readers to jump into the series.

There are a lot of different ways to structure a series.

There’s the “one big book broken up into chunks” approach, like The Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire, in which there’s an epic story published a bit at a time, and each volume doesn’t really have its own narrative arc. In this case, you’d better hope readers discover that first book because there’s no coming in to it late.

There’s probably the most common format, the “episodic” format, in which there may be some big-picture plot arcs and there are character arcs that stretch over the whole series, but each volume is still its own story with its own narrative arc and beginning, middle, and end. That’s what I’ve been doing with my series. There are shadings within that, with one extreme being a bit closer to the one big book style, like I’m doing with Rebels, where each book has its own narrative arc, but those arcs are part of a big picture arc and lead directly from one to the next. There’s no real jumping in to that series. You pretty much have to read the first book. In the middle would be the romantic mystery series, in which each book is its own distinct case, but the character stories arc through the whole series, usually with a romantic relationship gradually developing between two of the characters. You could pick up any book to read first, but you’ll probably get more out of the character stories if you read them in order. The extreme of “episodic” would probably be the mystery series without real character arcs, where each book is entirely separate and the world more or less resets between books, like the Nancy Drew series. Nothing changes in that world, and you can read the books in any order without it making any difference in the narrative.

Then there’s the “spinoff” format, in which each book in the series is about a different character. The best friend of the main character in book one becomes the main character in book 2, etc. You see a lot of this in romance, where it can be difficult to follow the same characters into more books since each book needs a romantic happy ending. So you’ll get a series about a group of friends, with book one establishing the group and the supporting characters from one book becoming the main characters in later books, with the previous main characters becoming supporting characters so you can see how their lives are going. Each main plot is generally distinct, so you can jump in anywhere, but it will probably make more sense and be more meaningful if you read them in order.

And there’s the “world” format, in which the series is mostly about a particular place, with each book being about a different aspect of that place or different people in that place, with some crossover (characters from one story showing up in another story). The big example would be Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. There are sub-series within the big series that work best if read in order, but you can generally pick a thread and dive in almost anywhere. The more books of the series you’re read, the richer the world feels, and it rewards re-reading after you’ve read more so that you recognize all the people who show up and understand how their stories fit into the big picture.

I’ve been thinking of different kinds of series I might try writing as a way to build an audience. I’ve thought about doing that mystery format, maybe a “strange small town” situation with a case in each book and the amateur sleuth and the pro detective at first clashing and then gradually falling for each other over the course of the series, though I think I would do it more as contemporary fantasy than as mystery, with a variety of cases rather than just murders (does it have to be murder to be a mystery?). I have a hard time suspending disbelief when a small town has a ridiculously high per capita murder rate, and there are a lot of other kinds of cases to solve.

I’ve also thought about trying a “world” series, where I build a fantasy realm and tell a variety of overlapping stories in that realm. That would take some planning to figure out how it all connects, and I’d have to find a way to make it a truly interesting place. I think this is what I might do with that idea of the low-stress escapist fantasy concept and make it be a world people want to visit and enjoy, with the characters having adventures but not necessarily mortal peril.

But first I have to finish revising the book I’m working on, then finish writing a book, then write another book.

It has been interesting this week to see the reaction online to a certain big TV event earlier in the week (keeping it vague to avoid spoilers — if you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I’m talking about, but if you haven’t, this is still about writing). It looks to me like a significant portion of the Internet is unclear on the concept of what a Mary Sue is and skipped class the day they talked about deus ex machina when studying literature.

A Mary Sue is not a female character who’s at all competent. It’s a mocking term for a fan fiction trope. The term was coined in a satirical piece mocking the trope of the author’s self-insert character who takes over the story. “Ensign Mary Sue” in a Star Trek story was the new crew member who could navigate better than Chekov, pilot better than Sulu, outthink Spock, quickly solve engineering problems that baffled Scotty, and had a beautiful singing voice and was a brilliant dancer. Everyone loved her, and Kirk, Spock, or whichever character the author was in love with fell madly in love with her. Since fan fiction is written mostly for fun, I really have no problem with someone writing a Mary Sue. I think that’s how a lot of writers begin, in imagining a role for themselves in their favorite stories. It’s just not a lot of fun for anyone else to read because they’re reading for the characters they love, not for someone else’s self insert. To be totally honest, I’ve mentally “written” tons of Mary Sue stuff. That really was how I started making up stories, creating roles for myself and imagining how an idealized version of myself might fit into that world. I hope mine weren’t quite that egregiously perfect, but there’s a reason I never wrote them down and never shared them with others. They were for my own amusement.

There’s a huge disagreement over whether there can be a Mary Sue in original fiction, since there’s no new non-canon character being inserted into an established cast. I think it does happen when there’s a character an author is incapable of being objective about, either because they identify too closely with that character or because they’re in love with that character. An original Mary Sue tends to be a bland character with little development because the author’s love means she already thinks the character is fascinating, so there’s no need to do the usual work of making the character interesting to the audience. The rules of the universe warp around this character, so she gets everything she wants, is good at everything just because she’s special, and other characters bend over backward to serve her (unless we’re dealing with a Victim Sue, who is unfairly vilified in spite of being perfect, with everyone hating her because they’re just jealous). I happen to think that Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels has more than a tinge of Gary Stu (the male version) to him. It really seems like Lucas overidentified with him, for whatever reason, and that meant he was just automatically good at everything, he was the Chosen One With Magical Specialness, everyone adored him even though he was actually kind of a jerk, and it was so very unfair when they didn’t give him everything he wanted that he turned evil.

A character can be incredibly skilled and competent without being a Mary Sue. We just need to see the work that goes on to gain that skill. Spending years in training and gaining experience in preparation for doing something big means the character probably isn’t a Mary Sue. We’re seeing the work and the struggle behind the skill.

Meanwhile, “deus ex machina” means “god from the machine” and comes from ancient Greek drama, in which situations were often resolved with a god coming down from on high (using rigs, and thus the “machine”) to resolve the mortals’ problems. That was kind of the point of ancient Greek drama, to show that the gods were in control, but in modern fiction, the term has come to mean some random thing that comes out of nowhere to resolve the problem. It’s some object that happens to appear that’s just what they need or some new character who shows up to fix everything.

When a character who’s been there from the beginning and has spent years training to do a thing uses a thing that’s been there almost from the beginning and that’s been part of the story all along, and when it was a plot point that this character was given this thing, and when there was even a prophecy years ago suggesting that this character might do this thing, it’s not a deus ex machina. A deus ex machina would be if the exact magical device they needed to resolve the problem had just happened to show up at the right time, or if the problem was resolved by some new random character just showing up.

I also find it amusing that people who boast about how great something is because it busts tropes get so upset when that thing busts a trope.

This morning’s fun was a dentist appointment, so now my teeth are all white and shiny but I feel behind on my day.

I feel like I didn’t make a lot of forward progress in my revisions yesterday, but what I did do was rearrange a bunch of events so that they now flow better and there’s a reason for conflict and tension in each scene. Of course, this makes me wonder why I didn’t do it that way in the first place. This is a definite proof point for the advice to let a manuscript rest before revising it. After a few months, you notice things you wouldn’t have noticed when the story was still fresh in your head.

Really, time seems to be the biggest asset to writing. I find that the more time between initial idea and actually starting to write, the better the book ends up being and the easier it is to write. The more time between first draft and revision, the better and more comprehensive the revision is. Unfortunately, today’s market penalizes taking your time and rewards fast publication. The only place where I find that taking less time helps is in the first draft. The faster I write that first draft, the better the book ends up being, though that might be a chicken-and-the-egg thing because I tend to be able to write a faster draft because I’ve spent more time between initial idea and starting to write. So, is it a better book because I wrote it fast, or was I able to write it fast because it was a better book?

I’m thinking that my ideal process would probably involved braided projects — do the research and development on one book while revising another book, then draft a book while letting a book rest. Or something like that. I know I can’t really work on anything else while doing a first draft, but preliminary research can fit in with other things, and it actually helps to write something while letting a draft rest before revision. I just need to get a pipeline going to keep the projects flowing like that.

But for now, it’s revision on this book.

I’ve started on my book revisions, and I’ve noticed that there seems to be a common thread of problems in my writing lately, and that’s that I don’t let my characters make mistakes or be wrong. Their ideas tend to be right, and the things they try tend to work.

I guess I’m going too far in the other direction from trying to avoid one of my pet peeves, which is Idiot Plotting. That’s what I call it when the plot can only work if the characters are total idiots — they trust the obviously untrustworthy person, they go alone into the dark basement in a horror movie, they don’t take common-sense precautions. So, since I hate that as a reader/audience member, as a writer I try to avoid it. I make my characters make good decisions and show common sense. I also hate messing around — why waste a chapter with the character doing the wrong thing before they figure out how to do the right thing?

But I guess that can make for less interesting stories. I need to find ways to challenge my characters even while they’re being smart. They can trust the wrong person — but instead of that person being obviously shady, they can act like a person who should be trusted. If I make the scene interesting, I can have the characters try something and fail, but the failure gives them the idea for what to try next. After all, even Nobel Prize-winning scientists have a lot of failures on the way to their breakthrough discoveries. There may be factors they’re not aware of when they make their plans that can through a monkey wrench into them.

And I think I need to get over my own perfectionism and quit applying it to my characters.

We dodged a bullet, weather-wise, yesterday. They were forecasting severe storms with baseball-sized hail, with one wave of it hitting during choir practice and the big wave hitting right at the time we’d be coming home from choir. They moved rehearsal earlier to try to avoid the big wave, and we just had to hope that the earlier wave would be more scattered. I only had two kids show up for children’s choir. We ended up not getting any of the earlier wave where I was, so I got home before there was any bad weather. The big wave seemed to be a lot slower than they expected and it wasn’t too severe by the time it hit us. Still, it was enough to wake me up when it hit just after midnight.

But that gave me a chance to think about the book. I’m currently struggling with a big disparity between the book that was in my head and the book I’m actually writing. The book I’m writing is probably better than what was in my head in a lot of respects. It has more conflict and more nuance and detail. But none of the scenes I had planned fit the story I’m writing. The big-picture plot is still good, but the scenes to carry out the plot no longer work.

I realized that when I was nearing the end of the scene I was writing and I didn’t know what would happen next, so I didn’t know how to end the scene. I went to look at my outline for the next few scenes, and none of them worked. I’d already dealt with some of the planned story beats, which eliminated some of the scenes, and there’s other stuff going on that I don’t have scenes planned for.

So that means I need to do a little regrouping today. I did figure out some things that can happen with the next scenes while I was being kept awake by thunder, but there’s some fine tuning to do.

The other day, I was talking about how tricky beginnings are, but what I’ve been struggling with this week is transitions, the parts that come after the big turning points. Particularly, what comes after the first major turning point. The heroine has achieved her initial goal, and the scene after that is the hard part because it has to establish her new situation plus set up what’s going to happen next. She may have achieved what she wanted, but now she’s starting to realize what she’s gotten herself into.

I think I’m on my third version of this scene, and I can’t just leave it and go on, with plans to come back and fix it later. The things established in this scene will play a big role in how the rest of the book works, so it needs to be right. Maybe not the exact words, but the events and the information that’s conveyed.

One problem I had was figuring out the characters. It’s a school-like situation, and my initial number of people involved was really too big to get a handle on, so I cut back. Then I had to develop all the characters who would appear, which also meant figuring out where they stood. Would they be enemies or allies? Who was going to do what as the story moved forward?

But then that made me figure out something new about the plot once I knew where everyone stood. There’s been a lot of going back and forth.

And still I don’t know that I’m quite ready to write it yet. Yesterday, I reached that scene and couldn’t seem to make myself do it. I told myself that I either had to write or clean.

So now my entryway coat closet has been purged, cleaned, and organized. It’s a thing of beauty. I keep opening it to admire it. It had become sort of the “junk drawer” of the house because there’s so little storage in this house. It’s a combination coat closet and broom closet. And, for some reason, it became the place where the candle supply lives. I have no idea how I ended up with so many candles. I think I’m going to have to start doing more things by candlelight to use them all. I like candles, but it looks like I was given a number as gifts, had a weakness for any kind of sale on candles, and then they might have bred in the darkness of the closet.

But today I will write that scene.

Beginnings are such a tricky phase of a book, especially in fantasy. You’ve got to introduce characters, possibly a whole world, and set up the story, and do it in a way that draws people right into the book. I think the most critical thing about a beginning is making readers care about the characters. If they care about the characters, then readers will want to know more about their lives, including their world and the history that affects them.

I got a case study in that last week when I tried to read a relatively recent book that shall remain nameless. This was a YA fantasy release from a major publisher, by a debut author. I haven’t seen a lot of buzz about it other than it being on a list of fantasy releases (I’m trying to be better about reading newish books), so I don’t think it was a “big” book given any kind of lead title treatment, probably the same kind of release I’ve had. And it had one of the worst openings I think I’ve seen in a long time.

There would be a paragraph or so about the current action — what the characters are doing now. Then a few paragraphs of backstory about their world. Then a paragraph of action and another paragraph or two about the world. Another paragraph of action, then some backstory about the characters and their history. And so forth. Very little of the backstory applied directly to what was happening in the present, and I didn’t yet care enough about the characters to care about their history and their world. It wasn’t the sort of thing the viewpoint character would really have been thinking about under those circumstances. The present action was the sort of thing that would have taken all her focus.

The result was that I couldn’t really dive into the characters and come to care about them because I kept getting distracted by the backstory. Because I didn’t yet care, I didn’t care about the backstory and kept skimming over or even skipping it. All the skipping back and forth between the story and the backstory meant I wasn’t really following either. At least in those 1970s fantasy epics that tended to begin with the wizard showing up at the tavern and telling the entire history of the world it was one coherent story instead of skipping back and forth. I kept trying to read on in the book, but I don’t think I ever really attached, and after about page 80 (it took me nearly 5 days to get that far), I skipped ahead and skimmed a few bits, found that my guesses about what would happen were more or less accurate, and gave myself permission to put the book down.

It looked like a fairly common rookie mistake from someone who’d heard the advice not to just dump backstory in but who didn’t quite understand how that worked and didn’t get that splitting up the paragraphs didn’t make it not an infodump. I’m just surprised that the editor didn’t do something about it. I think I would have really been pulled into the book if we’d just had that opening scene, which on its own might have been very moving, and then learned exactly why that event was so significant. Instead, we were told the significance before we saw the event, but instead of making the event more meaningful, I think it took away from the emotion. I did notice that the initial Amazon reviews were fairly harsh on the infodumping, but then there was a wave of “how dare those mean reviewers say mean things about this awesome book” reviews (most of which mentioned receiving a free copy in exchange for an honest review).

I was particularly concerned because the book I’m working on now has a lot of similarities to this book (one of the reasons I was reading it, as it might come close to a “comp” title to compare mine to when marketing it to publishers). In my case, there’s an incident in the heroine’s past that’s utterly critical to understanding the inciting incident, but I didn’t want to put it as a prologue. The solution I came up with (which may or may not stick) was to have an opening scene in which she has to deal with a daily life situation that shows her strengths and weaknesses. She got into this difficult situation because she has a tendency to daydream and get sidetracked, and once she’s out of the difficult situation, she goes back into the daydream, which involves obsessing about a memory about this past event, so then I follow her daydream as a flashback, showing that past event as she remembers it. And then the inciting incident happens and we know why it happens and why it’s important to her. We still don’t know why it’s important to the world since the heroine doesn’t entirely know. There are bits and pieces of what she knows in both the present and in the flashback.

I think (hope!) this will work, so readers will care about her and be curious about what daydream is so distracting, then want to see how this past incident will affect her life going forward.

I haven’t exactly been stuck on the book I’m working on, but I have been dissatisfied with how things have gone after the first big turning point. My heroine has crossed the threshold into the world of the story, to use Joseph Campbell terms, but the new world wasn’t quite clicking for me. I realized that while I’d developed the place the heroine was from, her ordinary world, quite thoroughly, and I had the external trappings of the place where the story takes place, I hadn’t dug into it enough to figure out how it worked and what the people in that place would be like.

So, it was back to the drawing board to figure out the specifics. That led me to really figure out the villain, what he’s up to, and why. Then that made me figure out the structure around him — who’s in his family, who are his allies? That gave me a new character, essentially giving a soul and identity to a character who was basically an extra, little more than human scenery.

And then further digging into things gave me another new character who I think is going to be what I needed to spark this part of the book. My problem was that I had a mostly offstage villain. He shows up enough to suggest that he’s going to be trouble, but there’s nothing the heroine can do about him without making a big stand that will upset the order of things. She’ll probably end up doing that in the climax of the book, but for most of the book there was no specific person who served as a true antagonist on her level. But then this round of digging gave me a henchman who’s a peer of the heroine and who’ll be around her on a daily basis. He’s not in direct opposition to her yet because he doesn’t really see her as a threat, but his presence means she has to be very careful about what she’s doing, and he’s a representative of the offstage villain who will be present in most scenes..

And now I have to replot the book because it’s going in a different direction than I initially planned, but it’s for the better.

I think I also need to do a bit more character work. One of my challenges is that there’s a group of about twenty people, and I’ve been treating about half of them like extras, but I really need to create characters for each of these people. I may go back and cut the number down. That might make it a little easier so I’m not juggling so many people.