WRITER'S WORKSHOP

by Metara

The difference between a good writer and a great writer, in terms of attitude, is the willingness to write off more than 24,000 words of a draft because the concept was fundamentally flawed, and start over.

I have done this and it is not a happy thing.

When Narrative Tragedy Strikes

Conceptual flaws are one of the hardest things for an editor to deal with. They're not like factual errors, which can be bad, but are usually solveable with clever rewriting or even a find/replace command. If your story has a big conceptual flaw, quite often there's just no way to save it. Making changes at a conceptual level is like trying to replace a bunch of timbers in the foundation of a house. You can't take out anything here without having the whole thing come down around your ears.

And finding out exactly what's wrong can in itself be difficult. To continue the house metaphor, conceptual flaws are woodworm: you can't see them directly, you can only observe their effects.

WARNING SIGNS (don't laugh at these, they're serious!):

• Beta-reader asks a "why" question and you don't know how to answer
• Characters engage in repetitive, unproductive circular discussions (waffling)
• You're having to force things to happen to get where you're going (deus ex machina)
• You're already writing and still don't know what the villain's plan is
• You "just don't feel right" about the way the story is going

1) Stop writing. Right now. This runs counter to normal advice, but it's important on this occasion: don't keep building up and up on a bad foundation. The more you write, the more of your time you'll waste and the less likely it is that any of the work will be reusable.

2) Examine motivations and narrative imperative. Bad plotting--as opposed to careless, clumsy, factually flawed or technically poor writing--is always the result of a lack of internal coherence. There will be someone, or something, which does not make logical sense. If you can't see it yourself, a good beta will be able to flag it, so ask around.

When Good Fics Go Bad

The trouble was, I had not given the new character a plausible reason to agree to help. In fact, helping actually damaged his long-term prospects. When I went back and tried to fix it, thinking that perhaps hate-fuelled desire to get back at another character might explain his self-detrimental actions (ONOEZ insane villain ploy #905764!!), I realised that as a direct result of my oversight the new character furthermore had no reason to exist in his current state and situation. While I knew who he was and had some reasonably good ideas about his narratological connection to the main hero, I could not come up with a reason why after 900 years spent as the unchallenged ruler of another realm, he would suddenly decide to turn his back on what he'd achieved and go chase some meddling kids because someone else asked him to. Or why none of the heroes would know about his continued existence. Or why another main character, who had also spent a good many years in the same country under his rule and was the key dupe of his evil scheme, wouldn't figure it out at once. Or why he hadn't gotten involved in those 900 years worth of history, if he was such a brilliant and dedicated schemer. He'd just BAMFed in out of nowhere, adding insult to injury with the subscript that he'd actually been there all along when he blatantly wasn't. And then there was the fact that I really couldn't see how the heroes would connect the primary event with their quest at all, let alone go in search of this guy they'd never met or heard of before. All these things contradicted my exhaustively designed internal canon in many many bad ways.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the presence of this character was the key to unlocking all the subsequent events for the story, plus the main characters' actions, and their motivations. There wasn't a question of replacing him with someone else because I specifically needed him. Suddenly, nothing I had planned made sense.

In fact I'd made the n00biest of n00b mistakes: trying to force characters into doing something because I wanted them to. I decided I had to shoehorn the characters into performing certain actions at any cost. In doing so I'd created a scenario that was nonsensical.

(Well, at least that explained why the heroes had spent most of a chapter wondering aloud to each other what the hell was going on... I really ought to listen to them more...)

That brings us to step three--the rescue plan.

Help Me Obi-Wan

The sorts of screw-ups that require serious rewriting are pretty much always to do with a Prime Mover problem. The Prime Mover has to have an internally consistent motive for what he or she does, which doesn't contradict anything you've previously written--or you're in real trouble. You can't push it away by saying "Oh, my villain's insane and wants to rule the world" because that's just the start of it: you'll then need to work out why she's trying to rule the world this particular way. And even insane people have reasons for what they're doing. If she's got a voice in her head telling her what to do, you'll have to figure out where the voice came from, even if you're never going to tell your readers that outright, because you yourself will need to know.

So, I take it you've figured out what the problem is, and you know it's not one you can fix easily. If you're a dimwit like me, you'll have quite a bit of now-useless material on your hands. Hopefully not 24,000 words worth though. The good news is you may not have to throw it all away. After extensively rewriting all of the first half of ELOZE I am a master at patching things together, and I found during the process that a scene which had to be cut from City of Fire might fit nicely in Broken Mirror, etc. So don't add to what you've got, but keep it on file for now.

Now comes the worst part: going back to the drawing board and coming up with a new concept for your story. I can't give much advice for this one since the issues will be different for every story, but I can explain what I did in this case:

I liked the new villain and wanted to keep him. In truth he was a pretty cool character; I'd just screwed up on account of being in too much of a hurry. He was introduced too quickly, without explanation, and became nothing more than a deus ex machina plot device--which didn't even work very well, meaning I had to force the other characters to respond despite their natural inclinations to go a different way, and then they went out of character and became what Godawful Fan Fiction calls "pod people" (watch The Bodysnatchers). So, after moaning softly for a while, I went out for a long solitary walk until I figured out how the new character might legitimately come into the story and how that'd impact on everyone else.

What I decided to do after that was re-start the story by writing a chapter or two sympathetically from the perspective of my main villains (and this was a first), because they were the prime movers of events.

Things turned out differently from there, of course, but when I understood what the prime movers were doing and why, everything else fell into place. The story's not quite as I imagined it would go, but then they never are.

Sometimes you just gotta take a sledgehammer to it.