Today, I'm editing part of the first chapter of The Engineer's Craft. Here's a peek at the process.
During the review process (where I give people the rough draft of my book to read), I noticed that several people got stuck for a few weeks in the first two chapters, but once they hit chapter three they tended to binge it towards the end. I asked a friend of mine who is an avid reader why she thought this was, and she said that in the first few chapters, everyone is just too nice to Bartus. I realized that while the first section of the book was doing good setup for the later story, it wasn't a good story by itself. There wasn't enough tension, development, drama, conflict, etc. to engage the reader properly.
So, I've been going through and rewriting the first two chapters to (1) give Bartus more agency and make him proactive rather than passive, and (2) make people meaner to Bartus. Revising this lens has really shown me how few decisions Bartus made in the first two chapters--I'm not surprised that people had a hard time reading such a passive character, even if he is endearing.
Draft One
Draft Two
Notes on the changes:
(1) in the second paragraph, I removed "though Bartus knew that the conversation would not be taken up again if his master had any say in the matter." Because I'm trying to shift agency to Bartus in these sections, I didn't want to focus on what Derani wanted in the conversation, but instead what Bartus was going to do about the conversation being cut short. I also realized that having a section break in the first chapter is dangerous business, and that I needed to leave a hook for the reader to pull them into the next section. Draft One ends the section with Bartus feeling defeated and taking the other apprentices to the shipyard. Draft Two ends the section before the break with Bartus being cut short, and then deciding to do something about it. It's like a mini-spoiler or a promise: "if you keep reading, Bartus will figure something out." The reader feels like he is someone they want to follow.
(2) While perhaps true to life, "The rest of the morning passed slowly" is a terrible intro line after a section break in the first chapter to maintain a reader's attention. The goal of a first chapter is to convince someone that the main character's life is interesting enough to follow. Having a slow morning is not interesting. Instead, I decided to place Bartus in a (somewhat) active position of reading beneath a tree. It provides a more interesting image and also allows me to jump right into what he's doing to convince Derani. Again, being active.
(3) My editor brain told me to take out the description of the other apprentices. But I loved it too much, and so it is staying to breathe a little life into the world and the scene. I also wanted to give the reader a sense for Bartus' dedication to his apprenticeship: "most apprenticeships are two years, but he's going to stay for a complete one." A small detail, but it will help solidify Bartus as diligent.
(4) Towards the end of the novel, I realized that Archenan had a much bigger role to play in Bartus' development than I'd previously planned. Here, I wanted to give him more life by having actual quotes, and including a description of the book Cylinder and Sphere since it kind of represents Bartus' bible as an engineer. Instead of having him paraphrase a quote, I'm currently working on putting in an actual quote, to show the true effect that this book has had on Bartus.
(5) The quote from Archenan comes from a famous Archimedes quote (Archenan is largely based on Archimedes, and Bartus has some small inspirations in Da Vinci). Sometimes, you have to find the part of writing that makes you excited to write. In editing Bartus, I decided it would be fun to find and tweak quotes from famous historical mathematicians and turn them into epigraphs.