Please excuse me while I reflect on the fantasy novel that I have been writing. The project title which may not be the final title is “Taravella” and the first draft has chewed me up a little bit as of late.

I don’t want to spoil much if anything about this novel, but I can tell you a little about its development and the issues that have been plaguing me as of late. In case you haven’t figured it out, my writing style is a bit chaotic. I write what’s in my head, but every story no matter how large or small, starts out as several incomplete thoughts. I often get those thoughts down on the page as scenes, bits of dialog, and outlines. Rinse and repeat forever.

This process can go on for quite some time, but what I end up with when I’m writing a fantasy novel that’s already nearing 200,000 words is a story full of holes. There are entire chapters missing, others that have one scene, and others that are composed of a few notes each written months apart none of which fit together neatly. The holes aren’t plot holes exactly. Some writers may start at the beginning and work forward. I start everywhere and work where I want to.

This only gets me so far. Eventually, I have to go back through and fill in. Often my chaotic tendencies take over again, and I do my filling in a chaotic fashion again. Some holes get filled in, others are left untouched, and almost counterintuitively, others get larger.

As of late, I have been buckling down, working through Taravella from the very beginning, and concentrating the bulk of my efforts on filling in the gaps, leaving only a complete—or at least first draft complete—version of the story in my wake.

That got me pretty far. I think I’m in the back third, though it can be hard to tell. Some spots that I thought would be a chapter have ballooned out and others have shrunk or have been eliminated so my estimate may be off.

One chapter I have been working on for a couple of weeks now. Every day the same chapter has been staring me in the face. I write some words, delete some more, and typically come out ahead but it never felt good. I was connecting the dots, and the dots were interesting, but the lines I was connecting them with were straight filled with events of no consequence or interest. I was going through the motions, and it didn’t feel good.

The other day I was in the slog again and becoming increasingly unsatisfied. I kept trying to justify it with a “Save this work for the second draft, just get through it” sort of mentality. I unfortunately have a hard time with that in nearly all aspects of my life. If I am painting a room and after I finish one wall I notice that I have runs everywhere or the trim is messed up, I have a real hard time starting on the next wall and giving it my all. I want to fix the first wall first. I want the standard to be there from the start. Heck, the other day I lost my earbuds, something I use every day, and despite having a viable backup, it ate at me and ate at me that I didn’t know where my earbuds were. I probably wasted two hours over the course of a couple of days idly looking for them.

This level of obsession has served and hurt me well.

In the case of Taravella, it helped me immensely. As I was staring at the page, trying to inject something of meaning into the scene I was working on I just grew more and more frustrated. I thought back over the last few thousand words. Words that took me too long to write, and I couldn’t find much of value. There were glimmers here and there of a better story, but nothing that went anywhere.

I was about to close the laptop. Admit defeat for another day and hope for a better tomorrow. I’m glad I didn’t do that. Instead, I reminded myself of one of my concepts. Maybe you could call it a mantra. Try to make each chapter and each scene stand on its own. I love Inglorious Basterds for this. In that movie you have the opening scene which is almost a half hour long and then you have the bar scene later in the movie taking up a similar amount of screen time. Both only have a burst of action, both involve characters we don’t have a reason to care about yet, and both drip with tension and intrigue. They are some of the best scenes to ever hit the silver screen, and each could stand on their own as a short film with little to no changes.

How could I make this chapter—the same chapter that has lost interest for me—approach those scenes? How could I make it so that if someone picked up my book, rifled through the pages, and randomly began reading right from this chapter, they would have a good time?

It wasn’t the first time I’d asked that question, but this time I started working through it on the page. What started as just me writing about my frustrations turned into a flurry of writing that may have rivaled the problematic chapter in length. In a few minutes, I managed to weave an outline for the whole chapter, the next chapter, and a good start on the third. The new outline gave the thin chapter I was working on meaning and girth. It gave it impact on characters and events, and it still, with the help of the other chapters I’d outlined, connected the dots that I had been so desperate to connect. I had to take a couple of steps backward to be able to execute on this new visions, but that would have been inevitable anyway if this chapter was to ever improve.

I suppose you could argue that if I’d moved on in the first place, I still would have got there eventually, but I’d argue that I’d just be painting another wall with runs and poor trim for a room that I’d never want to look at again.

Quote of the Moment:

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson