Revisions are underway on the first draft of my short story, Ketoshé 12, and already I’m banging my head against the desk. My readers last week provided beautiful insights, so I’ve got this sucker torn apart as I attempt to cut through the fodder to the heart and soul of the story.
Image note: As promised, the week-by-week blend is coming along. You can see it to the left, and it looks like a depiction of the mysterious woman in her world before she meets our hero.
Let’s gut this bastard
Last year I read Story Genius by Lisa Cron and it changed everything about how I write. I used to be a pantser, vomiting up words until my brain withered. After shifting to plantser for about a year, I now consider myself a blueprinter or story modeler. Vomiting up words doesn’t work anymore unless I already have a strong idea of who the main character is and how each tackled problem gives their decisions meaning.
“A story is about how someone grapples with a problem they can’t avoid, and how they change in the process.” – Lisa Cron
If you’ve already read the first draft, you know Khalon has several problems he can’t avoid.
- His gut is ripped open and he’s dying.
- He still hasn’t completed his job, and the final step is a little too far away.
- He’s put value on the image of a woman he’s never met, nor does he know her name.
- A dragon is about to bite into him and swallow him whole.
- His ship and crew are nowhere in sight.
Okay, so not all of these end up unavoidable problems, but if we scale it down into the most critical – Khalon is dying. If this happens, he can’t complete his job, he’ll never find the woman in the image, and his crew will be without a captain.
To make matters worse, if he doesn’t get the Adaran reconnected to the Tahira, this entire planet of dragons will stay prisoners on the surface. With only 1000 words, it’s tough to write that component in – how critical this one small task is.
But going back to Lisa’s words, I’ll need to keep the focus on Khalon, the problem he can’t avoid, and how he changes in the process. So let’s talk about the changes that need to happen.
- The first change that needs to happen is physical. He’s dying, but we need him alive. This might come in the form of his ship and crew arriving in time to get him to med-bay.
- The second change is plot related. He has to return the Adaran to the Tahiro or his crew doesn’t get paid and the dragons stay prisoners.
- The third change is emotional, and here’s where the soul of the story is. Or as Lisa likes to call it, the Third Rail.
“Think of the protagonist’s internal struggle as the novel’s live wire. It’s exactly like the third rail on a subway train—the electrified rail that supplies the juice that drives the cars forward. Without it, that train, no matter how well constructed, just sits there, idling in neutral, annoying everyone, especially at rush hour.” – Lisa Cron
The third rail is the emotion that gives meaning to all of Khalon’s struggles. If you glance again at Khalon’s unavoidable problems, we find a piece of the puzzle in the woman’s photograph. So here’s a little backstory:
No one knows who the woman is. He was given this image by his sister not long before she disappeared on her own mission. Khalon’s life was already filled with repressed anger and shallow sexual encounters, but something about this woman tugged his heartstrings. At this moment in his life, his feelings toward her are growing, and yet he chides himself for it every day because it’s like looking at a celebrity photo and believing there’s a spark between them. This emotional need and internal battle have bubbled his loneliness to the surface, thus creating an inner conflict that drives all his actions.
Because I like to dig straight to the darkest shadows of my characters, I gutted Khalon’s emotions and found this third rail:
Khalon believes he can control his emotions through high-adrenaline risks. Every job he takes on for his crew is more dangerous than the last, allowing him to make himself believe his loneliness and desire are false emotions.
I now have all the underlying changes I need for this story:
- Khalon will let go of his misbelief as he sits on the brink of death and realize his emotions have a subjective truth. He’s about to die, and the only thing he can think of is this mysterious woman. So he’ll need an emotional shift from suppressing his feelings to accepting them and creating a new misbelief that launches him into the next adventure. i.e. The full novel I have planned for this couple.
- He obviously can’t die, so I need a way to save him. The dragon might feel like a deus ex-machina, but this particular dragon sees his own death on this world in relation to the Adaran. The swallowing ceremony is how dragons bond with humanoids to create magic, and in this instance, the dragon sacrifices himself to Khalon as a bonded partner in order to save himself and his species. – This single act causes a physical change for both characters.
- And finally, because of the physical change, Khalon is now able to complete the job, get his crew paid, and release an entire species from bondage, thus creating a situational change.
As you can see, there’s a reason I bang my head against the desk a lot when I’m revising. Every moment and every scene needs to have meaning, and I’ll just keep digging until I find it.
Piecing the elements together
In where I find my next dilemma. How do I pull all these elements into a 1000 word story and convey their meaning in a continuous flow?
Time to play with the structure. And since this is a short story, each moment of Khalon’s singular journey needs to keep escalating his dilemma until he finally slams the Adaran back in its slot and releases the flow of energy that frees the dragons.
This is where I stumbled onto another snag. Khalon’s on the ground, he tries to stand, he’s on the ground again, about to give up and call his life over when the dragon appears, so he stands up again . . . you see the dilemma? I’m wasting valuable space in this story by the up and down movements when these can be smoothed out.
The other dilemma is about the woman. Right now she’s his final thought as he accepts his death and the dragon’s presence is what drives him to stand. But his emotions for this woman, I want them to be a bit more real than they are right now. She needs to be the force that drives him to his feet to keep going, because this emotional thread will solidify his own internal conflict and help Khalon understand that what he feels is subjectively tangible and real to him.
What this all means is that a few elements will need to be swapped around to show readers a stronger flow from dying to one last shot at victory to oh fuck where he’ll find his darkest moment before he saves an entire world.
Keep following the journey
Anyways, that’s a glimpse at the madness inside my head. Every single thing in my stories have meaning, and sometimes digging to the heart of it takes me days of frustration until I find that one golden ticket. Even in this story I’ve discovered something about the Adaran I didn’t catch at first, but that linked to another half-written science fiction novel I battled through last year and finally shelved for its cursed pages. But the real truth is: no matter how much meaning everything has, sometimes the real battle is getting it on the page in a way that gives readers deeper connection to the story.
Keep your eyes on my blog as I continue my journey in the coming weeks. And don’t forget Melissa and I are also giving away prizes. Don’t forget to sign up and follow this blog for your chance to let us dig into your work.
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K.J. Harrowick is a freelance web developer and graphic designer with more than a decade on industry experience on a diverse range of projects. As a child, she fell in love with fantasy worlds like those found in the books of Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey, which continued well into adulthood with the worlds of Ivan Cat, Rand & Robin Miller, Terry Brooks, Orson Scott Card, and E. R. Mason. She began to world build and create fantasy languages in 2004, and in 2014 it became a full-blown passion to write and publish her own books. Currently she resides in the rainy Pacific Northwest where she works with a broad range of client projects, plots how to destroy her characters’ lives, and occasionally falls down rabbit holes. |
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