Dawning Sky – An Artist's Site

Draft number six. It’s going to be draft number six, almost to a complete nuclear restart so I can write this story properly with an outline, better direction, a more robust setting, and a thorough knowledge of the characters who inhabit my world. It’s going to require patience and persistence. It will mean an understanding with myself that this story is going back to the very beginning, and the “we’re finished” is going to be a long way off. More important, it will mean an understanding that this is not a failure, just another lesson on the path to writing the story that I want to tell. Part of me agrees that I should finish and deliver the story, but if I know that the story is weak and that there are too many errors that I can correct with the careful application of structure and craft, then I don’t see why I should put more energy toward something that isn’t the best that I can do.

Am I a perfectionist? Uh… yeah. I want things to go well, to be correct, to display the best possible result whenever possible. When it comes to my work, I want feedback if the product isn’t what the client wants so that I can improve. Improvement is the goal, because perfect is impossible. If I can improve with more time, then why not take that time to improve? Why not learn more and use that to make a better story?

Hollow is not my first story, nor is it my second, or even my third. Hollow is a new world, a solo venture that started more than five years ago now after a seemingly innocent conversation that sparked a wild idea. At the time, I thought that it was silly that someone could spend five years working on a single book with the opportunity to dedicate the majority of one’s creative energies to the title. I thought that people who couldn’t finish fixing the worlds crammed between the spaces in their ears in a decade’s time were lousy time managers and horrific multitaskers. Now, as I scowl at the outline in progress and push the negative “dude, again?” thoughts from my mind and embrace the “this is how one learns to be a better writer” mantra, I realize that some ideas take a long time to grow, and they require time and space to evolve to something that can flourish in words rather than ideas and sparks between synapses.

I struggle with the endings of stories. Wrapping a story or a scene presents the biggest challenge. I can start a scene, and I’ve received consistent feedback from coauthors and readers/listeners that I have a good bead on how people talk and the flow of dialogue. But endings? Ending a scene is a chore. Ending an entire book? That is something I’ve never done very well. As I neared the end of the fifth draft of Hollow, I was rewriting the ending because of changes that I’d made to some of the main characters, which affected the resolution of the entire story. Of course, certain details changed. Those details altered the established rules of “magic” in this urban fantasy, which alerted my continuity alarm. I rewrote the first scene based upon that tingle and…

… well, that was the scene I posted earlier. I like it. I think it’s better for the characters, better for the story overall. But those little changes, alongside some issues that I had with the believability of magic in my world…

Look, I can suspend belief in the logical very easily. My desk is covered with figurines from a show about magical talking ponies, and I enjoy stories about steampunked secret agents in flying (or is that falling gracefully, Welly?) cars. I write metahuman heroes. My imagination gets a workout every single day… but I was writing one of the last chapters for Hollow yesterday, and it occurred to me that, if a rift to the abyss opened up from the floor of a penthouse apartment, wouldn’t that grossly undermine the structural integrity of the building? Wouldn’t all the tenants below have holes in their floors and ceilings? And come to think of it, why would a crimelord with a demonic heritage and refined tastes ever allow someone to conduct what amounted to open-heart surgery on his plush white carpet?

Really. The continuity alarms dinged for engineering and interior decorating purposes, but they weren’t the only questions. The bigger ones asked where I was going, what I planned to do with the characters who survived to the end. Could they return to the plans I had set for them before that one character change? What did fixing one plothole with an on-screen character death do to the motivations for the other characters? Did I truly know how the story was going to end, or was I just putting down words because I knew that I needed them for the Magic Spreadsheet, and it was more important to put down words than to stop and figure out what purpose the words needed to fulfill?

(Mind you, I came to this realization while listening to Diana Krall on my phone at the gaming shop around 10:30PM last night. It takes all kinds, that’s for sure.)

So, the resolution is that I need to go back to the beginning and outline the story. I’ve got my copy of Save the Cat, which is beat up and still has post-its in it from the first time I used it for the outline… five drafts ago. Now, I’m going to outline the story, but I’m also going to set down the rules of the world, get a better understanding of the characters, and get more in-tune with the city of Las Perditas. As far as the Magic Spreadsheet goes, I will likely dial down my daily wordcount and embrace the use of the Pomodoro (25 minutes of uninterrupted and focused time devoted to a singular task without giving in to external interruptions or internal distractions) while I work on the outline, the character development, and the worldbuilding. Once I have a strong outline and strong characters, then I can begin the rewriting process.

As silly as it sounds, the simple act of keeping a sketch of the characters on my wall at the dayjob has done wonders. My boys stare at me everyday, Cheshire with his scalpel at the ready in case he thinks I’ve got a heart that would sustain one of his kind and Brooks with his hand over the failing stitches in his chest to hide his weakening tie to the earthly plane. They aren’t going anywhere, and I know it… but I also know that they deserve a better story, and that story is going to take more time in the telling.