No, I’m not done with my first draft yet. Right after I had written my previous post I fell ill, and haven’t been able to write much since. I am improving, and hopefully I’ll be able to write tomorrow unless I get worse again. But since I haven’t been able to write it, I have been thinking about it a great deal, particularly after a conversation with a good friend of mine on Thursday. There are a couple of things I’m going to change in the second draft, and I thought writing about it here would be a good way not to forget it – particularly since I have massive amounts of story notes by now.
Firstly, I have discovered that I have to give another character (let’s call him Bob) much more room. He’s not the main character, nor a minor one – he is important, but not a viewpoint character and not very relevant to the main character before later. The reasons:
1. There is something that the reader must learn fairly early in the story, to learn WHY it’s so important that they do what they do. But it’s also important to the story that the MC herself doesn’t know this information before very late in the story, or she would never have acted the way she does. However, the person who reveals this to her knows Bob, and he can do this just because he has gained some level of trust with Bob. It would therefore make sense for Bob to learn about this much earlier, and it would explain a lot of his actions in the first half of the story. Making Bob a viewpoint character, showing the reader that he learns this, would solve the issue very easily, and would most likely make the reader care more about a certain later part of the story. I think.
2. The main conflict in the book, besides the one between Bob and MC, is much more important to Bob than to MC, who is mostly dragged backwards into it despite her wishes and best efforts. You don’t deny Bob a lot in this world, at least you won’t live to reinforce it. The main twist affects him much more than MC, and it’s his reasons and goals that drive the conflict. He will not be the MC – that is a change I will not make, as it’s my current MC’s story – but the severity of it is best shown through his eyes. He is hit the hardest, he is the one with the strongest emotional investment in the conflict and its solution, and he is the one who knows even when the MC doesn’t. Some things can only be explained through him.
3. It is also important to me to show that even if he seems like a villain in the beginning, he is not really. He isn’t good, but not really bad either. He just has his own reasons for doing things, and they are actually for once very good in this case, and it’s important that the reader knows this if the last part of the story should make sense.
4. It would also make some explanations easier for me, as there are some scenes that are very tricky to write from the MC’s perspective that I can cut. Instead I can write earlier or later scenes that tells the same thing in another – and more natural – way.
5. I can describe my MC from another viewpoint, which isn’t all bad. It will actually be fun.
I am fairly sure where I will introduce his viewpoint properly, and I think it will help the story a great deal. Besides, he’s an awesome character despite – or perhaps because – everything. Like himself.
But that’s for the second draft. I’ll finish the story as it is, then change what needs to be changed in the next round. There are quite a few things to remove, and even more things to add, like a new and very annoying character. Normally I’m a bit cautious about adding too many things to a story, but on the other hand, I feel a story has to have a certain level of complexity. This is after all the first story where I’ve had enough to build on to actually add things… Anyway the second draft is into the future. I’ll have to finish the first draft first, and then I’ll take a break and plot another story from two years back, a story for which I’ve finally found the real conflict and the real story, if you will. It sometimes take a while to find it.
