Courageous expansion

It's rewrite time.

I'm making the prose more purposefully purple in One Last Quest, my rewrite of my 2012 self-publishing adventure, trying to keep the howling Inner Critic out of the process while the Creator piece gets to roam around again. I'm still shocked at the thinness of this book, not just physically, but also in terms of characters and such-as-it-is plot. I'm not trying to be unkind to myself here, but on a re-read it feels much like those classic animation processes, where a background layer is moved along one step at a time as each character cel is placed atop it and photographed. I remember writing it initially, and retyping and refining it, and being bothered by the pace of change. Like animation, it was difficult to imagine the final product while focusing on the incremental steps.

I've been working on developing out the characters lately, giving them motivations and goals and trying to add depth and purpose to make them more than a shallow, colorful prop in the story. (OK, perhaps a little unkind.) I don't plan to make rewriting a habit once I've clicked the "publish" button, but after the luxury of years I wanted to do better by this story, and by the characters. And I'm being a little selfish, too: I'm trying to build out my back catalog of completed works, and OLQ has a sequel from around that same era. I'd like to give that a try, too. "Writing a series" is a skill I want to hone.

At first, I'd held off on cracking into the first edition. It felt unkind to my past work, or too monumental to attempt to fix everything. But the Creator is taking lessons from the Revisor, too, and learning that this process is also iterative. The enhancement, additions, and injections doesn't happen all at once, it doesn't have to happen smoothly, and it's allowed to be disruptive. And that was freeing. Letting go of the expectation of "I'm going to make this better, so it must be better" and turning instead to "this part here, this small part, could be more" was a tiny thing, but the courage compounded itself. The high of fixing up a sentence to be "yeah, that's better" is all I need to do... the insertion of more detail, a livelier verb, of sense-descriptions over bland modifiers... all of these things can happen at the micro level, and will accumulate in the macro.

So much of this initial writing feels over-polished to me. Not in the way that it's great, but more in the way that it's just totally smooth and slick and easy-to-digest. I'm focusing on the pathos now, not only the plot, and trying to see the story as part of the overall journey of the characters at a point in their lives, and not just a series of shared background matte paintings that unwind behind them. The perspective of a dozen-plus years since I first set the story loose has given me that, and the willingness to expand their universe just that much more before re-release.

🧩🦏