One Last Sidequest?

One Last Quest is gaining dimensions, and I'm just along for the ride.

This is good news for drafting-me, less good news for future-editing-me, but that's a tomorrow problem. I cracked open this first self-published attempt hoping to salvage it, or rewrite it, or restore it, like an artifact pulled up from the seabed from a simpler time. ("This is how I used to think dialogue was written, and also I really liked this one sentence structure I guess.") I've felt all the feelings about it, from the initial pride and accomplishment, to a quiet bucket-list check-off item, to embarrassment, and now to a gentle tolerance and acceptance. But then it became a project and that was my undoing.

This was my third-ever NaNoWriMo entry, and if I remember those early entries, I went from "barely successful" in year one, to "overblown epic" in year two, to this book "jokes and cheap laughs" in year three. It is, or at least was, paper-thin. Not bad, necessarily, but not particularly deep, or well-paced, or developed. I describe it now as quick. A quick little book full of quick little jokes as the characters move from points A to B to C to D. It clocks in at almost exactly 60,000 words, which came to be my lower bound for typical month-long drafts. It felt like a Big Deal, revising and reworking it, shaping and trimming it.

Now it's on the desk again, open for scrutiny and study. I have a few rules.

1. Keep the general plot structure the same: the story still moves from A to B to C to D  
2. "Honor what's come before" in terms of character names and temperament
3.  When in doubt, go for a cheap joke/pun
4. Have fun

That last bullet point is the most important one to me, to tell you the truth. I have tried and set aside other pieces that are Serious Works of Fiction and they're fine, but they're not fun to write. It's challenging to find the right inspired mood to want to complete them, and I worry that shows in the writing. If it feels like a struggle, then it will read like a struggle, and I don't want that. Quest was always a send-up and an homage, a love letter to the comic fantasy books that caught my attention and kept me hooked on the genre. As much as I love and envy Tolkien's world-building and mythologies and sweep and scale, I've had a lot more simple fun reading Pratchett's Discworld books and spin-offs.

So I'm expanding Quest right now, from beginning to end, injecting all the parts of the story in that I glossed over before, or didn't know, or didn't know how to express. Their are reasons for the characters acting as they do, besides the need of the ABCD plot. There are motivations and frictions now. And there are descriptions, and there are many, many more jokes. I'm having fun. I don't want to say that it's writing itself, but I've reconnected with this old world, and am able to listen to the characters that live in it, and they are filling in the dialogue and the details and the backstory that I lacked in the first draft. I was attached to the outline back then, but now the outline is just the frame for the action. What happens within the frame isn't my choice or in my control.

So the current "problem" non-problem: that initial 60K short novel is clocking in at 90K right now, and plotwise we're somewhere between A and B. There's a lot to go.

I'm going to let the story expand as it wants to, filling the space and gaining some air before I set it back aside with the promise of a revision. My silly little quest-adventure has grabbed me by the pen and is hauling me around on side quests.

 🧩🦏