Traveller's Tales

With all due apologies to JRRT, it was too appropriate not to use as today’s subject.

I’m back into The Grey Knight, the first book.  I’m executing some structural changes primarily based on good thinking from my kick-ass agent, who may have hit the nail on the head with a fascinating bit of counterintuitive, er, intuition.

I don’t want to gush too much just yet, mainly because there’s no guarantee that this change will result in a sale — but I do like what it’s doing to the story, and her fresh perspective has absolutely helped make things gel.

Basically, the critiques I’d been getting had been about pacing (of the ‘builds too slow’ variety).  My agent’s advice was to make the chapters longer.  I gave that a little WTF at first myself, and then I went back and re-read the first few chapters.

And you know what I found?  Holy shit, they’re too short.

The Grey Knight’s story is a whirlpool, not a straight line; there are three primary stories that begin separate and unconnected, and then slowly come together until they smack head-on into each other with a bang near the end.  Practically, that means a lot of scene switching, and, logically, I need to really get a reader invested in each primary character, to make them interested enough in each to want to go back to them after a scene switches to a different primary POV.

Short chapters, clearly, would not facilitate this reader-character bonding process, and as I re-read those early chapters, I’m forced to agree with her analysis: the early ride is way too bouncy.  Later on, I think it works just fine, first, because the reader is familiar with the characters now, and second, because the pace of the chapters speeding up as they near the conclusion makes perfect sense.  But early on… man, really bad idea.

I’m midly surprised I didn’t see it myself, but focusing so much on keeping things fast-paced, I wasn’t looking at the manuscript with the right set of eyes.  It’s a great bit of Craft wisdom to pick up, and already the story reads MUCH better as a result of the change, even to me.  I do hope it’s not just me, but I really think we’ve got something here.

Edits are in progress; my new netbook is a truly excellent technical partner, but I also have to give some credit to TextBlockWriter, which helped me visualize the structural change in the document before I started dragging chapters all over the place.  I’ve got a self-imposed completion date of 3/12 and a self-imposed delivery to my agent on 3/13.  She keeps telling me end of the month, but the writing is hot and fast, there’s some great stuff coming out in between the structural edits, and I want it out there again.

So, apologies if I’m a little scarce between now and then, but I’ve got a novel to polish.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 11:38 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.