The revision continues with The Chapter of Really Long Sentences. For one character, that’s fine. He’s an academic. He’s noted at one point to “bloviate unbidden.” Heroine shouldn’t join him for several reasons: it’s windier than her established style, contrast to her conversational partner, and even lovers of long, twisty sentences get exhausted when that’s all there is.
This is largely fixed by breaking up compound sentences with periods. Sometimes I drop the conjunction; sometimes—horrors!—I start the following sentence with the conjunction.
I mean, if you want your fiction to read like business correspondence, you do you. I’ll be over here doing… not that.
I had Heroine thinking about all the ways a narrow chute she has to navigate could be a trap. It amused me, but it wasn’t serving any functional purpose in the story. I had it selected, finger poised over the delete button, when I realized I could keep the “pfft, it would be so easy to make this a trap” thought and move the “oh shit, this is a trap, I’m gonna die” part to her subsequent trip through the chute, which will already be more stressful and can accommodate a soupçon of extra panic.
Me: How can I juice up “it’s cloudy”?
Me, with a pornstache, hairy chest, and lots of gold chains: Can’t go wrong with a creation myth. With lots of parentheses on points of contention. Babe, they’re gonna love it. TRUST ME.
Sure, why not? I’ll have a million opportunities to WTF + Delete.
16 Hours Later: WTF + Delete
(Actually, WTF + pasted into my bucket file. The way it’s told is making my brain tingle, but to the surprise of no one, a creation myth is not the best way to juice up “it’s cloudy.”)
My spirits flagged when I came across a note to change one of these scenes to Hero’s POV. Bleh, real work for the first time in this revision pass. Do not want.
Mercifully, Past Me roughed it in for me. Hero’s newly added perspective was all in fragments, but at least there was something to work with. There’s about half a page of Heroine’s thought process that may or may not need to be transplanted elsewhere (depends how thorough her thought process is in the next few scenes—I haven’t seen it in a year, so I don’t know!), but Hero can’t read her mind, so it doesn’t belong here.
He has to retain some mystery until he spills the truth to Heroine (and readers) at about the midpoint, so the only exposition I need to add is his side of things we already know (where did he get the idea to seek out Heroine). The rest is fully in the present (what’s his impression of Heroine, how does that compare to his expectation, how far is he willing to go to get her to do what he needs, his state of mind when it clearly doesn’t go his way).
A little more work than the previous few scenes, but gently easing me into the bleh, real work portion of the manuscript.
One of the reasons that scene works better in Hero’s POV is that Heroine gets everything she wants. There’s no unfulfilled need at the end of it to carry her forward. Hero gains nothing, loses physical items and most of his hope, and is left in a state of abject desperation. We’re left wondering how he’s going to get out of this hole, and that question is a reason to turn the page.
Heroine still goes into the next scene with low tension, but we broke up a 10-page lull for readers by getting them out of her head for a bit and into a higher-stakes POV. The 2 pages needed to build up her next What Fresh Hell Is This are a little dip in the rising action rather than a tedious extension of a long plateau.
I also twiddled with the cover a teeny bit. A smoky layer takes off some of the shine and adds atmosphere. So that finally feels finished.
Looking forward to a time when I can show it off…
