Today I'm finishing up my Chapter One rewrite (see here for a peek).
During this revision process, I've realized how much of being a writer is just attention to detail and how editing allows us to go deeper in that attention. In a sense, writing a story is like excavating a fossil--one brushstroke at a time, revealing more details the further you go down, until a complete image is conjured and it's ready to be put on display. The overall shape might draw people, but the details sell it.
An example:
As I began edits on Chapter One, I realized that the long-dead engineer-philosopher-writer "Archenan" became way more important in the final chapters than I'd imagined when I first threw him into the story, and that my edits should reflect that importance and bring him in more during the first chapters. As a sucker for epic fantasy and all its excesses, I toyed with the idea of doing an epigraph or a small quote at the beginning of each chapter.
Since I'm neither a philosopher nor an engineer, I decided to pull quotes from Archimedes (the real-world inspiration for Archenan). This led to me reading way more of On the Sphere and Cylinder than I ever wanted to. I had a few good quotes, but not enough for 18ish chapters. I got the four best ones and decided to make them fit thematically at the beginning of each of the four parts instead.
After sharing these quotes with my writing group, they told me that it would be great to have one for the beginning of each chapter to really bring Archenan into the story more. My friend Robert mentioned that if I was worried about where to get the quotes, I could pull from other famous mathematician-philosophers as well, since I was already editing them to fit the world of the Republic and Bartus' situation. Nobody would care if I pulled from Pythagoras instead of Archimedes, if I disguised it well enough.
Taking his advice, I pulled and (mostly) modified quotes from Archimedes, Pythagoras, Isaac Newton, and various others who I can't remember but probably should have written down so I can credit them.
But there's another layer to the attention to detail in the epigraphs--now that I have several of them written, my primary goal is to find ones that can match the mood/message/meaning of a chapter. A few of the Archenan quotes are humorous (I really enjoyed finding my inner crotchety-old-man to write some of these as if they were directed to apprentices), and these would be out of place at the beginning of, say, chapter sixteen which begins with one person getting stabbed and ends with another person getting stabbed. A somber tone would more appropriately set the mood for the reader.
If you click to enlarge the list of quotes, you can see where I've begun to put ideas for chapter-matches in parenthesis after some of the quotes. I probably won't keep all these quotes, since they don't all match with a chapter. But I'll keep stealing from old dead guys until I have enough to fill out the chapters.
Next time I write, I'll be working on Chapter Two and maybe updating on querying!