Writing Update

So yesterday and today I managed to write. I've pretty much hit the ultimate moment in the novel, which turned out to be a bit more violent than I'd expected. I'm not sure if that's because that's what's supposed to happen in the novel, or if I was just imagining the evil bad guy was, say, a thief or storage unit provider. It's still not graphically violent. I leave most of it to the imagination of the reader, but it is kind of vicious. I think it works though.

However, that last chapter is not yet finished. All the aftermath stuff has to occur (I literally quit writing today with a dagger in someone's gut; I haven't written about all the emotional fallout that comes after that), and then there's the epilogue, where some significant things also happen. Which means it won't be a simple 2 or 3 page epilogue. But I have some time to write tomorrow morning, so hopefully at least the chapter will get finished. I can get the epilogue done after Christmas I suppose.

Which brings me up to rewrites. jimhines is currently in rewrite phase and it's brought to my attention that not everyone rewrites the same way. For example, he says he sits down with the printout of the novel and works through it first, making numerous notes about things that need to change, need to be added, etc. Then he starts at the beginning and works through the book making those changes/additions.

I on the other hand don't sit down with a printout of the novel and read through it. In fact, I don't even print it out. During the course of writing the novel, I've made numerous notes on things that need to change and scenes that need to be added. Alot of these notes have question marks after them, meaning I didn't know if they were necessary at the time, but now that I've reached the end of the book, I know. Some of these notes are as simple as "make certain Varis hands Weston the flowers from his wife" while others are more complicated, like "change the emotional emphasis of the beginning of the book regarding Ottul". That second is harder because it doesn't really require a new scene necessarily, but altering already written scenes in a subtle way so that they read slightly different for the reader.

In any case, I already have my notes, all mixed up in a little notebook. Once I sit down to do the rewrite, I read through the notes and remind myself of what changes I intend to make, then I tackle a section of the book. Sometimes just a chapter, sometimes more if those chapters don't have many changes in them. But every time I sit down, sometimes even after a break on the same day, I reread ALL of the notes of the changes I intend to make. Once the change is made, and that change won't affect any of the scenes after that, I scribble out the note. so by the end of the novel, I only have one or two notes left.

I find that the biggest changes I make in the revision regard emotions. My greatest weakness (I feel) is character, so in the revisions I try to pay close attention to the characters and how they feel, how they are reacting emotionally to the scene, Varis in particular (for obvious reasons). In the revision of Vacant Throne, I'm going to have to add numerous scenes simply because I need to build up more of an emotional impact for the final scene that I wrote today. I realized in this scene exactly what Varis' emotions needed to be in order for the scene to work. Now I need to set them up better. The skeletal structure is already there, but in the rewrite I need to flesh it out, emphasis certain things more, etc.

Anyway, just a few thoughts on revising, brought on by where I currently am in book 3, and by jimhines. It's all his fault, really.