The comments on my last post were really interesting, and made me do some thinking today. When I sat down to work on Phoenix today, I decided to look at the broader picture by outlining, in two or three sentences, what is going on in each scene I’ve revised so far.
As I did this, I realized that my chapter breaks are in all the wrong places. Not only are most of the beginning chapters way too short, but the breaks just didn’t feel natural. I decided to rearrange them.
At first, I thought it would be easy, but after an hour of trying to figure it out, I realized that it was a lot harder than I’d thought.
Then, I remembered what Brandon Sanderson taught in English 318: chaptes are like miniature stories in themselves, where each one has a beginning, middle, and ending that leads to the next chapter.
Once I starting thinking of it this way, I was able to organize things in a workable pattern. While the story progresses at a steady pace throughout the book, each chapter is organized around a common theme. The chapter begins with an issue or problem, and ends when that problem either is solved or totally spins out of control.
For example:
Chapter one begins and ends with Ian’s unease about setting his feet on the surface of a planet since he was six years old. His ship, the Avion-45, gets hit by some kind of futuristic EMP and the captain decides to abandon ship. The central issue is Ian’s fear of going planetside–a fear that he doesn’t understand.
Chapter two begins with the crew loading onto the escape pods to make an emergency landing on the planet. There is an accident, and Ian’s pod gets separated from the rest of the crew. Ian, with Melinda and Ben, crash land in a desert. The chapter ends with the bandit attack, with Ben and Melinda wounded and possibly dead. The central problem is that Ian is progressively separated from his peers, and it gets worse right up to the end.
Chapter three introduces Leila, a princess kidnapped by the bandits and abused by their women. They send her out to investigate the battlefield, and she meets up with Ian. She manipulates the situation so that the bandit women think that Ian has rescued her and subjugated them. The main problem is Leila’s subjugation by the bandits, and the chapter ends with her successfully turning the tables on them.
Etc etc.
So then I used this way of thinking to outline the next chapter that I need to revise. As I wrote it out, scene by scene, I realized that the best way to develop the central focus of that chapter was to combine two events into one and reorganize how I did the perspectives. Not only would that shorten the chapter, but it would also make it less choppy and more straightforward. It would also build the suspense a lot better.
So now, even though I know that I have a ton of work to do to rewrite that chapter, I’m stoked to dive into it because I know what I’m doing. If I keep to this method, I think that the second draft will be much stronger than it otherwise would have been.
Oh, and I decided to revise my goals a bit. Here are some daily goals that I think I can actually accomplish:
- Revise at least six pages of The Phoenix of Nova Terra.
- Write at least 500 words in Hero in Exile OR write a wikidpad article about some aspect of the story universe.
These are goals that I feel I can actually accomplish on a daily basis. And if I think I can accomplish them, I’m sure I will.
What I really need is to keep my mind in both stories at the same time. That’s the real challenge. But if I want to write professionally, that’s a skill that I’m going to need.
Finally, here’s something cool a friend of mine just showed me. If your Meyers Briggs personality type is INTP (or if you have a significant other whose personality type is INTP), this might interest you. It’s just so hilarious that a bunch of INTPs got together and made a website devoted to their personality type. If any of the sixteen types were to do it, it would definitely be them.
