Last week I talked about the DM’s screen, and how I’d written chunks of story with other chunks missing. Now I’m rewriting the first Dawn book with that in mind. I’m about 30 pages in so far, and no section has escaped either strong editing or a complete rewrite. As I read closely what I wrote in 1st draft, I see the biggest DM screen error is probably this- character motivation. Largely it’s missing. And I try to consider the effect this will have on the first-time reader coming cold to my work. They have no reason to ‘help out’ the storyteller by filling in the missing motivations for themself, or to wait for the motivations to become clear later on. They won’t do it. So I have to get into it myself.

– Why does Dawn do any of what he does? Why are his actions so damn abrupt and final?

– Why are the other kids so fond of him, when all he seems to do is beat up on them?

– Why does his mom do what she does? Why does the Abbess do what she does?

All these before were hollow shells. I figured that by leaving them empty now we’d get into the story fast, and I’d come back to them and fill in the holes with flashbacks later on. It would be an accelerated start, followed by a cool kind of sequential storytelling deal.

BUT.

Read More

I`m still working on my Dawn* books. I`ve sent them out to agents and got no`s so far in reply. So I`m trying to make them better. Here`s some of the feedback I got from readers:

– I didn`t know what was going on.

– The writing is too dense and descriptive in parts, I just skip over it.

– Who are all these people, and what do they look like?

These are all kind of the same thing. I know it, too, and knew it when I was writing the book. I wanted to get into some action, dialogue, and get the story moving. After it was moving, I`d drop some description on the readers.

Compartmentalizing

I like the idea of compartmentalizing. What I mean by that is this.

– This is a section of dialogue. It`s pretty much just dialogue and nothing else.

– Alright, then this is a section of description, it describes those people who were in the dialogue. It`s probably pretty dense, with lots of made-up words.

– Now this is backstory, it`s all tell, it`s all lumped together, it probably feels like we`re going off at a tangent.

I gravitate to writing that way. But when I think about it, that`s not really a story. That`s a D&D master`s field guide. Here are your stats, your descriptions, and some phrases. What I`m producing is the resources of a story, but not the story-telling. I hide behind the DM`s screen, toss out lots of information, and expect the readers to put the story together for themselves.

Hmm.

I must admit I like that style. The notion that the book is a riddle, a mystery, and the readers have to read into it to get to the story feels good. ** But without a doubt most books are not written that way, and for a good reason.

A self-constructed story?

People want to be `told` a story when they read a book. They don`t want to have to tell themselves the story. That`s the author`s job.

I realize this further when I read bestseller thrillers like Daemon and The Lost Symbol. The reader doesn`t have to work, except to keep reading and turning the pages. There`s no chance that they`ll miss out on something. If they read it, and if the writer wrote it well, they get it all.

That`s what I need to work on.

Perhaps this is just an aspect of the second/third draft for me.

First Draft

I`m making it all up. I don`t have a plan, other than I need a good guy and a bad guy and conflict between them. This is the DM`s guide section. I break (invent, create) the story and the world in building blocks, laying them out one after the other. It`s not integrated, not really, because I haven`t got a whole world for it to integrate into yet.

Second Draft

I`m still too close to the material to do much more than cosmetic changes. I move sections around, fix grammar, remove the worst of the purple patches. What I don`t do is integrate. It still feels like the words I wrote the first time around are imbued with some kind of magic. For sure this makes some sense. I still can`t see beneath them to the story actual, so I`m worried that if I erase them, my bridge to that magical world will be gone.

Third Draft

Where I`m at now. I know the story well. I`ve written synopses and summaries and blurbs for it. I know the beats, the most important characters, I know where it`s going. If ever I could begin to integrate the story more, to properly tell the story, it`s now.

So now I`m rewriting, trying to smooth things out, include enough of every ingredient as I go along to make a proper story. Of course I have the ever-present worry that what I`m doing will somehow make the story worse. But at this point that hardly matters. It has to change, or I just leave it alone.

There`s at least one round of submissions left, so fingers crossed.

NOTES

* The Dawn books are a 5-book fantasy series, following the adventures of Dawn through a dark/weird fantasy world, trying to figure out who he is and what he`s supposed to do. I`ve written about three of them, and submitted the first to agents.

** I loved Mark Danielewczi`s House of Leaves, which was exactly this. Every page had 3 or 4 story threads happening at the same time, some running as footnotes along the bottom, some written backwards, some in boxes, some in one-word-per-page segments.

As the reader you had to read it all simultaneously, and kind of come up with the over-story yourself. I enjoyed that, though I guess it was kind of hard work. Probably most people want to just chill out when they`re reading, not work hard to understand.