This isn’t going to be very long, because it’s late at night. Aneeka was kind enough to read my story, and gave some good pointers. I was pleasantly surprised that she felt that she could understand and sympathize with the characters. I was especially surprised that she sympathized with the main character, Ian, because he’s the one who eludes me the most. He’s basically a quiet yes-man who keeps to himself, an average guy who prefers anonymity. Definitely the opposite of my personality! But I might have struck the right note with that.
She also pointed out a couple of flaws in the way I chose to develop two of the characters. First, when I introduced Melinda before the crash, I introduced her as a very strong woman who had risen quickly in the military ranks. After the crash, she broke down and displayed a lot of stereotypical feminine weakness. I had done that in order to put Ian in a position where I could show something of his character, but later decided that he wasn’t like that after all, so I was more than happy to rewrite this scene.
She also pointed out how Leila, in the first scene in which she appears, does some things that are just stupid, which makes it harder for the reader to connect with her. She’s a very independent young woman, but I had her stand up to her captors in a way that was just asking for abuse. I wanted to introduce her as a prisoner receiving abuse at the hands of her captors, in order to generate sympathy for her right at the outset. Having her do something stupid takes away from that, so I decided to have her think out her defiant thoughts without saying them out loud. It did seem to work better.
So, instead of adding on any words to the story, I quickly ran through it from the beginning to end and made the revisions that made the most sense after chatting with Aneeka. It took me about an hour, so you couldn’t exactly call it a major rewrite, though you could say that it helped to put me on a better track.
I’m not going to do much revising at this point–I’ve just got to get the darned thing down on paper. You can’t rewrite what you haven’t yet written. Just got to move forward.
