Hey-a, squiders, how’s it hanging? This week is a Disaster and so mostly I’m eating a lot of chocolate and quietly panicking.
But anyway, let’s talk about my edit and how it’s going! Or, rather, how it’s not going, because Life is doing that thing again.
Now, to be fair, I have made some progress. I wrote 400 words on the new first chapter.
They were awful. Seriously, just the worst over-written, pace-killing words.
And to even write those 400 words, if you remember, I had to get my friends to guilt trip me into writing because of performance anxiety and all the importance my brain had heaped on the re-write of chapter one (and arguably, this revision as a whole).
Imagine, if you will, how frustrating it is to have your brain fight you on doing a basic, necessary task for several days, and when you finally trick it into doing said task, all your fears are justified.
You ARE a hack, you CAN’T write this book properly, you ARE NEVER going to get it finished and published, etc.
Anyway, it was not good.
Later in the day, I had some time to sit and consider why said 400 words were not working, and I ended up thinking, too, about Hallowed Hill. After all, HH has, arguably, one of the best openings I’ve ever written for any story, and I hadn’t hardly had to touch it in revision.
So, I said to myself, what did I do differently for the beginning of Hallowed Hill than I am now?
Well, that was easy. I wrote the beginning of HH in first person.
See, Gothic novels are often in first person, so I set out to do the same. And I made it, oh, maybe a thousand words, in first person before it became apparent that it was not working and I switched to third person. So when I went back to change the very beginning into third as well, I noticed a few things.
While you cannot be as voice-y in third person as in first, you can still maintain some of the voice in third, which makes the passages more engaging. AND it cuts directly to a character’s wants and needs.
Part of the problem with the first chapter of Book One is that there is SO much going on. There’s the war to introduce, and the fantasy world-building, and oh so many characters, and it’s easy for me to get bogged down in all that. And it bogs the writing down too.
So I got up early the next morning, and I wrote 600 words of opening in first person.
And lo and behold, it cut through all the fluff to what was important.
Then I took my 600 words of first person and my 400 words of third person and spliced them together into something actually useable, and now, dear squiders, we are off and running.
Well, off and ambling along because I’ve been having a hard time finding writing time. But it does seem to be flowing much better when I get around to it.
Fingers crossed that this will be the last time I have to rewrite this chapter.
I’ve a cool promo for you for Thursday, squiders, and then who knows what we’re doing next week. Something, I’m sure.
