Emotion and Image

• Since my last post, I've completed edits to chapters 4-10 on The Engineer's Craft. This included re-working chapter eight completely. Sometimes, you don't know how to fix something until you've gone through and fixed everything that came before. I don't regret the month and a half I spent agonizing over chapter eight (even if I did rewrite most of it) because it helped me figure out what I needed later on. 
• In December, I decided to transfer over to using Google Docs for all of my writing and organizational needs. I really like some of the organizational features, like the ability to have different pages/sections where I can put each chapter and have it feel like its own unit. Sometimes, editing a chonky 120k document can be overwhelming, and this breaks it up. 
• As of this week, I've reworked my outline for the rest of the novel. Editing chapters 11-18 will be a lot of fun as I'm mostly moving things around. I've realized that a big part of the first/rough draft of a novel is finding out what emotional beats need to happen—and the later drafts are trying to figure out when those should happen in order to give them a greater effect. I've grown more as a writer editing The Engineer's Craft than working on any other project, with the possible exception of when I wrote The Alchemist's Lot after having spent my life up to that point on a different story. 
• My Intro to Creative Writing class is going well! I won't be teaching in Fall 2025 because there are so many MFA students who will be teaching it for the first time, so that's kind of a bummer. Because I love teaching so much but am still trying to figure out how much I want to lock myself into academia in the future, I'm thinking of exploring other avenues of sharing my knowledge.  

And now, notes on editing:

One thing I changed in the early chapters of The Engineer's Craft was to give Bartus a vision of the guild hall—an imagined image of what it would be like to walk through the doors of the institution he deemed most prestigious and desirable in the world. 

This was, in part, a way to give us a sense of Bartus' passion. But it also created an emotional shorthand for what he was inspired by. Whenever he needed to motivate himself, he would conjure up this image of what he wanted to accomplish. It was a small change, one I didn't think too much about, until later in my edits when I was doing the "snowy grave" scene where Bartus wakes up with the damaged leg and the realization that he will have to try and cross the ice-meld on foot if he wants to have any chance of surviving. In both versions (original and revised) Bartus confronts a deep depression that threatens to overtake him, a negative voice that tells him it is better to lie down, to just accept his fate and die. 

In the original draft, Bartus considers what this would mean for the joining the guild: 

This writing isn't terrible. But I also think that it tries to tackle the issue too directly. I can tell here that I was worried I would lose my audience if Bartus gave up on his dreams right here, a little over halfway through the novel. I wanted to make sure that we still pointed to the fact that Bartus wanted to be an engineer, even if this wasn't inspiring him right now. And there's just too much describing how Bartus feels, rather than portraying it. 

When I came upon this today while editing Chapter 11, I realized that I had a new way to convey this. Giving Bartus the image of the guild hall in the first few chapters provides an excellent image already established that can stand in for that telling. Here's the revised version: 

I'm still working on this section, so not entirely satisfied with it yet. But I think it's a lot more powerful than it originally was. Rather than worrying about the "assurance" that he will succeed, Bartus is struck by his own lack of motivation from the image of the guild. It is his first inkling that perhaps, deep down, there is something more that he desires. Something better. I think there is perhaps within each of us a deeper yearning for home and family, a gentle kind of happiness. But we tend to block it out with other, more temporary or visible pleasures that we think will satisfy that need. 

Here's how the resolution goes for each of these. First, the original: 

And then the revised version, where I leaned into the image that will inspire Bartus: