One of my goals in writing the first draft of Ghoulish Trappings had been to have two ongoing plots not connected with each other save in superficial ways, which is harder to do when one plot centres about one character, the other a different one and the entire story is from the first character's POV. There was also a lot of magicians, each with stories and goals of their own and the result was too cluttered a mess to make sense, with the motive force behind the entire story drowned out under everything else.
Noise overwhelmed signal.
So this version stripped out over two-third of the characters. One of the major plots had been banished, several characters no longer exist so minor ones are gone as well. I don't need more plot or more characters to make the story stand up: it just needs to focus on a small core and build on that. At least, that is my hope and desire this time around. We shall see how it goes.
And for the record, this entire draft is the fault of a certain prompt making me reconsider scrapping this entire section of the character's lives. Without it, Cam won't exist and that isn't fair at all. So ... it needs to be small. It needs mundane things. It needs to strain the weird relationship Bryce and Wray have and see how well it holds together.
It will also have an appendectomy in it now.
uhm, is this where I apologize...? O_o
ReplyDeleteNah :)
DeleteIt's fun to build a second draft and realize how much I had in that was, frankly, not going to work. Having two plots not connect is valid, only not in a story with a singular POV to it. The problem was that the first story felt too slim, as though I'd been forced to pad it out and attempting to avoid that ran into problems the other way.
So shall see how it goes. Still plan on the same basic opening scene but beyond that everything is interestingly vague right now.
"interestingly vague"
Delete...sounds like how I'd describe my own pantsing process ;)
Yeah: I pants the first drafts of this series a lOT more than I do other things. Even the second draft, as it turns out ... so far it has worked. I know the first two-three scenes, with nothing beyond them yet.
Delete