Believe it or not, the revision clings to life despite being neglected while I serve as a memoir ghost in a futile effort to prevent my longstanding housing insecurity from deteriorating into homelessness! I have a little break while the client is off pretending to be receptive to my suggestions, so here we go.
I “forgot” to do the status bar, so use your imagination about the Great Leap Forward!
Not gonna lie, code switching between soulless corporate writing gig/memoir/outlines for shitty mass-produced romances and the thing I actually want to write is like wandering around a haunted forest on a moonless night calling for my voice like it’s a lost dog. What answers the summons may be dog shaped, but it’s not my dog.
And that went right into the story incubation notebook…
If you take nothing else from this update, let it be that I whipped up the word “jibberini” to berate a reckless motorist, and yes, it is my fantasy-world equivalent of jabroni.
Trying to up the emotional stakes, I introduced a new, entirely reasonable dread, which I’m not going to make happen. You’re allowed some digressions that won’t be paid off, but when you write something intended to make readers go “oooooh,” they’re going to be disappointed if that doesn’t go anywhere.
Particularly if the point is to raise the stakes and nothing ever comes of it.
So that’ll get deleted in the next revision pass. For now, it’s a placeholder for “need something here.”
OR SO I THOUGHT. After sleeping on it, I realized this thing is representative of the gulf between what Heroine thinks her role is and what role Heroine actually performs. It can be woven in going way back to the second time she refuses Hero’s job offer, and I don’t have to change any events because she’s already doing her thing from the beginning. It’s an emotional revelation, not an action.
Coming to me at this late stage because I’m only mostly dead inside.
Thinking about how the above gets incorporated while brushing my teeth, I had a crash because Heroine cannot be in possession of a necessary implement for nonnegotiable plot reasons… which gave the subsequent upward rush more room to soar because she can sneakily be in possession of part of that implement.
Past Me, providing everything I need to work with once again.
And there are interesting implications for the overarching series plot, so this development I was going to trash proved important after all. It sounds like there’s supposed to be a lesson in this, but 99% of what I toss stays in the trash and the odd filth-caked gem saves itself, so… “be ruthlessly judgmental—it’ll all work out in the end,” I guess.
Chopped a page of old content that might or might not foreshadow something later in the series. Dropping breadcrumbs is good! But there has to be an in-this-story reason to make the crumbs feel natural, and there’s just no relevance here. Not only would this information be a jarring, out-of-place note now, but it would leave a big, obvious smear of WTF if 4 books down the line if I never found occasion to use it.
There are three parts to good foreshadowing. Everybody understands an illuminating source and a significant subject ahead are required to cast a shadow backward. Often overlooked is the reason a character is standing in the specific place that shadow falls. Present business should be the focus of every scene. The shadow should pass like a cloud in front of the sun, unremarkable until it builds into a storm and every reader caught without an umbrella has to shrug and admit the signs were there.
“Present business should be the focus” also applies to exposition, including flashbacks. A glimpse into the past should be triggered by something in the present and also have an effect on present events following the reminiscence. Backstory must be fused at both ends to the present in order to resonate. Otherwise, it’s a discordant infodump.
Writers are supposed to give characters “wounds” incurred either in backstory or right at the start of the story being told. Those wounds affect their behavior throughout the story, first as routine, then in increasingly maladaptive ways. By the end of the story, something should ameliorate the injury. Not POOF! NEVER HAPPENED, but maybe the gaping, festering wound heals to a scar that twinges occasionally when prodded.
Speaking as someone with PTSD related to childhood trauma, my experience with wounds is that you adapt to and normalize them so you can get through the day. You don’t think about them; you just deal—the exception being when you want to do something and can’t specifically due to this injury, and then you have all the thoughts and feels about it.
I’m a big meanie when it comes to dumping trauma on characters. They behave accordingly, but they don’t think about it.
But eventually I get to the point where I am now and have to worry about sticking the landing. Great as it is to save the day or win at love or whatever external plot problem is triumphantly resolved, an epically satisfying ending requires getting that wound under control. That means a) precisely identifying the nature of the wound; b) making sure it has manifested often enough in the story that readers are aware of the general vicinity of the injury, even if they can’t precisely identify it; and c) making sure there have been enough therapeutic interventions before the bandage is ripped off to reveal the scar tissue.
Because of my own baggage, I start writing with the presumption my characters have normalized the brain they live with every day, and that brain will lead them into similar situations repeatedly to show off its great/horrible coping mechanisms, and healing is hiding within all these external obstacles we’re going to smash. So I can be this late in the revision process before focusing on wounds because I’m confident the material is there to work with and I just have to massage it a little.
Heroine’s “wound” is the belief that in any given situation, she is the expendable one. This manifested significantly at a pivotal choice when she was 8 years old, was drilled into her during job training, was proven with a pre-story betrayal, and is the mindset with which she embarks on the story quest—she’ll get between her wannabe-hero employer and things that might kill him, and if they kill her, no great loss because she’s not the hero.
And yet other characters identify her, again and again and again, as a person who will get shit done. Her “hero,” particularly, comes to recognize she is the one qualified to save the day, the world, him, and anything else that needs saving.
And yet there’s a late-story event that reinforces her belief that she’s disposable and doesn’t matter, which influences her behavior going into the final crises and provides the emotional obstacle to overcome while overcoming the biggest external obstacles.
Yes, instead of “she doesn’t know she’s beautiful,” we’re doing “she doesn’t know she’s the hero.”
The next revision round is going to involve all that descriptive work I love so much (*falls over laughing*), so I have a piece of paper off to the side for jotting thematically related imagery that occurs to me. Since I’m not actually looking at the story yet for things to put in a particular spot, this is more a pump-priming exercise. I may not be able to use a specific thing from these notes, but how can I apply the idea in this spot where I need to pluck that string?
“Thematic imagery” may sound like a total drag, but my aphantasia (thanks to which I don’t “see” anything in my head) tremendously benefits from having reasons to describe things. Description that’s merely decorative is a waste of my time (whee, I get to write things that bore me as a reader), but give me a concrete benefit to describing something, and I become much more willing to try (if no more skilled at the execution).
For instance, I already have sheep on a hill in the distance to show spring has sprung and there’s enough grass to be out eating it. But if I extend that sentence with a few words alluding to flock behavior, it ties this passing mention to a theme about community. Now there are two reasons to include this bit of scenery, so I don’t hate it as much. Where I already have family members (part of a community) helping each other, I can add gestures of affection that provide opportunities to describe physical things I wouldn’t otherwise have any interest in.
(“Community” or any other single word is not a theme but a motif. The latter is used to point at the former, but they are not interchangeable terms. Thanks for coming to my peeve talk. I don’t have the actual thematic statement for this story at hand, but if you want a general idea of my views on theme-as-tool, I did a theme post for Silent Song.)
For basic sensory description, Heroine is known in story as “the shadow queen,” so there’s a reason to specifically address how light and darkness fall upon people, places, and things, as opposed to perfunctory “it’s daytime/nighttime.” While Hero is being a lying liar who tells lies, are there non-heavy-handed ways to partially obscure him? Is Heroine, the queen of shadows, more attuned to what’s hiding in the shadows while Hero focuses on the light, even picking out sparks of it in the dark?
At this point, I’m just opening a spot in my brain for POSSIBILITIES.
I had Heroine feeling guilt related to the Hate Mail Scene a while back, in which she killed a bunch of people who didn’t deserve to die, but it wasn’t sitting right with me. a) Killing people is her job. b) We thoroughly discussed that the consequences of not killing them would be worse for them, their loved ones, and the entire community in ways that would give Heroine nightmares. She would not feel guilt about those deaths.
Anger toward the parties who put those people and her in that situation, yes. Hand-wringing because she made the most humane call in an inhumane situation, no.
She should definitely have some thoughts and feelings about the prior difficult day because she’s not a monster who can simply brush off something like that, but the day-after sequence doesn’t really have a space for anger. She needs something quieter, softer, and unactionable because she has a ticking clock for an impossible task and has no time to waste on vengeance. Guilt fits in the space the situation allows.
In order to keep it in character, I shifted its focus. Not the killings themselves, but a string of misjudgments that failed to keep the tenderhearted Hero away from those killings. He’s been traumatized enough without that, she could have spared him, and now he’ll have to live with that blood on his hands because she failed.
Doing it this way also provides a reasonable explanation why she doesn’t want to do an ill-advised upcoming act as a team, which they have otherwise been functioning as for a while. It’s dangerous for her, she trusts that he’s committed to watching her back, she has accepted better odds of survival when they work together, so we needed this “I’ve fucked him up enough for one week” feeling to justify sending him off on a safe errand while she does something reckless. Otherwise, we recreate a problem from the previous draft that I already brutalized myself purging!
Got less than a page past transitional scene that struggled to be written before deciding its problem was that everything in it is probably irrelevant. It’s a great travelogue for a part of this city we’re never going to see again! But if I want to introduce Heroine’s criminal connections, there are more relevant places such an introduction could be performed. As is, it’s filler.
I left a note for Future Me to move the “we arrived and had no problem getting into the city because” part closer to their destination, and I’m just going to carry on from said destination as though that work is already done because going backward right now would be demoralizing.
Dear Brain: Could you please articulate these problems in a more timely fashion? Or at least develop a more assertive warning system than “vague meh”? Thanks in advance. You’re the best. Love, K
