Rewriting

Today I am rewriting a scene that was doing two things badly in the hope that I can get it to instead do one thing well. Part of the problem was that the viewpoint kept shifting from tight third person to omniscient, which is never a good sign.

Fortunately I find rewriting a lot easier than getting a first draft down – I have to keep reminding myself that first drafts are always crap.

This is why I can’t do NaNoWriMo. I’m impressed with anyone who can do it, and I don’t have a lot of patience with people who snoot at it as if either (a) there’s one true way of writing, or (b) only people who consider themselves professional writers should write, neither of which I think are true.

But if I had to write 50 000 words of first draft without going back and correcting the various false starts and polishing the things that needed polishing, I’d feel like I was building a house on jelly, and of the various things I had pencilled in for this November, ‘build house on jelly’ was not one of them.

Heavy Ice continues to be structured completely differently from the first two Requite books, which is interesting. The first two books started with a tight focus on Tzenni and expanded: Heavy Ice has more main characters, whose stories are starting to braid together.

I’ve had a lot of trouble all the way through with knowing a lot about what’s going on in the time period the book covers, but not knowing how much of it needs to be in the book. I hope I’m over that now and can concentrate on the story. Fingers crossed.

Also, this afternoon I realised that one of the characters is a dead ringer for an actor I’ve seen in various things – I’ve borrowed actors’ appearances before, but this is the first time I can remember doing it unconsciously. 🙂