So yesterday, I read through Chance and Reward – book three of the trilogy. I haven’t looked at this book for pretty-much spot on six years – it was October 2003 that I did the last edit of it.
A lot has changed since then – for starters, back then I was calling the gadda the opear, and I didn’t have the other guardians as involved. As for the changes that have occurred in the last few years, such as the introduction of the Forbidden Texts and the overarching storyline… Although I did have a spin out moment when I came across a passage where Ione is talking to Hampton about the FT (as I’ve taken to calling them) and I sat for a moment and stared at the page and thought to myself ‘Hang on, did they exist before I invented them...’
Anyhoo, in order to work out what was going on in the story and what I needed to add, I sat down and wrote a description of each scene, what it was intending to do, and then in red pen how I needed to change it (yep, did all this on paper – for some reason, I need to do a lot of this thinking stuff on paper, with the story open on the screen in front of me).
It was an interesting experience – seeing where I was as a writer six years ago, and where I am now. In terms of my writing style, I can clearly see the basis there of where I am now. It’s not as descriptive, and I’m much better with using detail to add value to the words, but all-in-all it’s pretty similar. The sentence structure in particular is very familiar, and in fact I had moved away from it and gotten a bit “I can play with grammar cause I’m being creative” and I’m now moving back to this more simple, straight-forward style.
The characterisation is pretty good, but the plotting is a bit hap-hazard. Well, I’ve always known I was better at one than the other. I’m amazed by the number of short scenes I came across that seemed to do nothing but put a character in a place or with someone, in a sort of ‘here’s where they are, in case you were wondering’ scenario. Scenes that either did nothing for the plot, or didn’t explore what they were doing fully enough.
There are some aspects of the romance that I really like – scenes that will pretty much remain as they are. And there are other aspects that need refining – firstly from Hampton’s side, and later from Mina’s. They both seem to give in to a certain aspect of the relationship too quickly – I’ve set them up with lots of potential for tension (much more than either of the other two couples) and I need to not be afraid to go there.
So, for this re-write, I’ve ended up with the closest thing to a writing plan that I’ve ever had – it’s going to be interesting to work through this process and see how it affects my creativity.