I’ve heard it said before that comparing a story draft to a published novel is a lot like comparing an acorn to an oak. And yet as writers, we do this all the time. Even during the first draft round of Writer In Motion I’m already comparing my story to what other writers have done.
And yet, one of the things that jumped out at me right away wasn’t the writing or the content… it was the shape of the story.
Last week in my first draft blog post you may have noticed I was already picking things apart and thinking about how much I didn’t love it. For me this is a totally normal process I go through. But while comparing the shape of my story to other writers, I noticed a glaring problem. I hadn’t written a story… I wrote a scene.
Normally this wouldn’t bother me at all, but I really want to nail Braygen’s tale this time as a complete story. Both to share a small bit about this wonderful character, and to leave just enough that readers know he’s got a much bigger story to tell.
And what better way to do this than to spy on expert storyteller Dan Koboldt’s draft where his tale had a full, complete and satisfying arc. Dan’s short hit all the right beats for me, and hinted perfectly at a much larger SFF world… exactly what I wanted to do.
GETTING TO WORK
Since my draft came in around 1600 words, I had a lot to cut. And since my trusty seven step method isn’t working this round, I decided to try a new approach that’s very on-brand for me—wrapping content like opening and closing HTML tags. If the first line opens with an analogy about olives, the last line should reflect the same, and I wanted to layer loops of content in so the story feels more like its own complete bubble. But that meant a lot of things had to go.
Sumra’s character was the first thing I tossed. She’s lovely, and her granddaughter is in my current novel, but for this story her only role was to save Braygen, and that didn’t work for me.
Second thing to cut was Braygen’s shifter abilities. Due to some unconventional science, dragon magic, and nearly four-thousand years of hypersleep, the humans on this world have become a very mutated form of shifter. Braygen is still part otter, but it wasn’t necessary to the story to bring this ability forward.
One of the things I wanted to really focus on was the squid-like parasitic sentients. However, in the draft I pulled in a little too tight to how they’ve mutated one of the cities. I need Braygen and his story to be the central focus.
NEXT STEPS
After figuring out some of the bigger content flaws in Braygen’s tale, it was easy to cut away half the words and repurpose the narrative to open and close ideas in a single arc.
I’m about 40 words over with a dozen content critiques called out, and once I’ve crawled into my second cup of coffee I’ll nail those final concepts into place. Because if I’ve learned anything over the past two years of writing, it’s that if the content isn’t there, all the pretty grammar in the world won’t fix it.
So for my little sapling that isn’t quite a tree yet, we’ve shed our first cold season’s leaves and we’re growing tall toward the sun. I’m really pleased with the way the revised version is turning out, and I have no doubt my CPs will have a great time gutting this thing next week.
