After spending a few weeks on vacation in Bend, OR for a family reunion, I'm back to editing!
As I finish my edits on Chapter Two of The Engineer's Craft, there are two principles I'm reflecting on in writing. The first is to always protect the agency of the main character. The second is something I've had to learn over and over and over again, which is to not be afraid to cut a "good" paragraph if it will make the chapter "great."
Allow me to elaborate:
(1) Protecting Character Agency. In the original draft of this chapter, Bartus sits in his room for a while after being fired from his apprenticeship and thinks. And thinks. And thinks. He wonders what he'll do next, how he'll solve life's problems, how he will avoid staying at home. In order to improve the pacing in this rewrite, I decided to remove this and instead begin the chapter with Bartus headed home, without having weighed other options.
(here's a picture of me trying to fly fish in freezing cold water)
In the original, he reaches home and declares to his father that he still plans on joining the Engineer's Guild (having thought about the options for way too much time). In the rewrite, however, I wanted this to be more of a conversation. I wanted Bartus to express thematic concerns ("what am I worth?") and for his father to help him work through the possible answers and solutions. This resulted in a scene where Bartus' father essentially tells him "you should still try for the Guild" and helps him figure out how.
While this helped the scene feel more like a conversation, after a day or so of sitting with the rewrite, I realized that it shifted too much of the agency to the father. He listens to his son, makes a suggestion, and then helps Bartus find a way to do it. The decision doesn't feel like it comes from Bartus, even though we know from Chapter One that he desperately wants to join the Engineer's Guild. It feels like something his dad thinks is good for him and encourages him to do...which is okay, but not inspiring.
Aware of this imbalance, I went back and edited again so that the idea comes from Bartus, inspired by a question from his father about what he thinks he wants most in life. Here's what that looks like:
Here, Bartus' father doesn't say "I think you should still go for the Engineer's Guild," as he did in the previous rewrite. Instead, he asks a question: "What do you want?" This is essentially the question that most stories pose to their main characters, though perhaps not as directly (read: clumsily) as I do here. Bartus' response is an opportunity for the reader to get more in his head, for him to make a decision rather than have one be thrust upon him, and ultimately gets the reader more invested in what comes next.
Maintaining Bartus' agency (especially during the call-to-adventure) is a crucial part of story-telling.
(2) Cutting a "good" paragraph to make a "great" chapter. Like I've mentioned in other posts, I hate cutting things. I work on something for a long time, and it usually works fairly well. Sometimes, the idea is what I love; other times, it's the language. But always, there are things I have to cut.
Take my revised ending of Chapter Two (which I'm working on today) as an example:
There are a lot of good things in here, but you can see where I've clumsily combined a few "good" things and made a chapter ending that isn't quite yet "great." Part of the problem is that I've squished two separate conversations together for pacing--originally, Bartus talks to his dad at the millpond and then again while they do chores later that night. Now, it's all happening at the millpond.
But it's cluttered and slightly repetitive. Bartus thanks his father, they hug, his dad says he loves him, then asks him to promise that he'd be willing to return home if it doesn't work. This is the main idea of the end of the conversation--to plant the seed in the reader's and Bartus' minds that a return is a possibility.
How does Bartus respond? I kept my original line because I liked it so much. "I'll accept that it isn't what Hidran wants for me." It's a fun line, one I enjoyed putting in here because it brings us back to Bartus' faith and the part that religion will play in this journey and its outcomes. It's also Bartus' way of saying "yes." The only problem is...Bartus isn't really saying "yes." He isn't sure. He backs out of that answer by not responding when his father asks him if he could do that. Da's two questions are both asking the same thing: "could/would you return home when this whole thing is over?" Bartus answers twice, giving two different answers each time. It's unnecessary, even if it keeps the line I really like.
Then again, maybe I'll just find a way to keep it in :)