Business & Craft Post: Rewrites & Plotting

I call myself a plantser - a  mix of a plotter and planner. There's a few other terms utilized for the two ends of the plot intensive spectrum - discovery writters and plotters, architects and gardeners, etc. The idea really breaks down to one more structured writing option and the other, more free form.

Being a plantser, I say is about having specific points in a story that you want to hit - in my case, a beginning and an end - and then, writing till you hit those points. There's certain advantages supposedly being a discovery / pantser gives. You have more organic feeling characters, your work can sometimes be highly surprising; but in turn, stories can meander, certain favorite plot devices can repeat across books without intention. You also at times end up rewriting certain portions as characters reveal more of themselves, and the need to deal with conflicts in character arcs or intentions crop up.

Another major issue I find is the need to foreshadow properly. More often than not, my work on the rewrite is foreshadowing fixes. If I decide towards the end of the book how a particular fight / scene will end; I need to foreshadow it properly in previous portions of the book. It can also be hard to foreshadow across multiple books, though there are ways of fixing that including dropping a lot of little red herrings that can be picked up later.

That does mean some plot threads are never truly resolved though.

Why This Discussion Now?

You're probably wondering why I'm bringing this up now? Well, there was an indication that people wanted to know about the backend... so here is something I've been struggling with.

Aeres Academy (name TBD) is / was a LitRPG Isekai Academy book I was working on. Am working on. I had a rough idea of the world building I wanted, the particular character magic and what I wanted to do. I figured the rest would resolve itself as usual, as I wrote - and started writing.

As usual, I had a book, arc and series ending. 9 books long, three 3 book arcs. 

Simple, right?

A few complications. I needed to finish this work between November to January, have it written and edited by then so that we could (potentially), hit the release date of May. There's a few things happening that might shift that (editors, cover design, narrator) so it's a bit up in the air, which is why I prefer having books written long before (at least 6+ months before their release). But this does mean increased pressure on the writing.

Ugh.

Ssecondly, and rather importantly, I'm running into a major issue with writing an academy story in that I'm not hitting the beats right. There's this... feel, when you are writing something and you realise it might not be right. I'm an instinctual writer in some ways, but part of why I can write instinctually is because I've done the repetitions. I've got over 3 million+ fiction words written by now, another few million (at least) in general (if you include corporate writing, blog posts, etc.). On top of all that, I have read and spent a bunch of time reading various works with different plot structures, reading craft books on plot structures, etc. so that what might be 'instinctual' has a theoretical underpinning.

All of which means that when my brain throws up yellow flags of why a book might not be working, I slow down. Sometimes, it's full red flags and I stare at the work, trying to work out what I did wrong.

The First Yellow Flag

The first time my brain threw up a problem was around 80k words in. That's pretty deep, since that would / should put me towards the 2/3 mark... but I wasn't there. I tried to figure out why, and came up with a few answers:

- Tension: There wasn't any. That was perhaps the biggest thing, which I knew had to be resolved. So I started digging into why in my brain and came up with....

- Lack of goals: There was no driving goal for the character towards the end of the book. Now, that can work in some books (see the Nameless Restaurant, A Healer's Gift, etc.) where it's meant to be a little more slice-of-life and cozy; but in this case, it wasn't. I wanted something a little more tension filled, so I definitely

- Characters lack character arcs: Which are perhaps one of the biggest issues when you're writing academy stories I think. You need the rest of the characters to be interesting, to give them arcs and goals outside of your main character. At least in my view.

- Uncertain Plot Beats: This is me. I'm not sure I 'get' academy stories that well. I think I'm doing okay with it, but... I was uncertain. This was / might be the usual mid-book jitters.

Either way, I brainstormed, came up with a series of changes that needed fixing. Much of that could be resolved in the edit of the first draft, so I kept writing.

Then... 

The Second Yellow Flag

I'm now 96k words with Aeres Academy and have hit a full stop. I can't go any further in what I'm writing. Even with the changes I made, I realised that there was a problem; that how I was structuring the story was wrong. It took me a bit to figure out why it was wrong, and it had less to do with the actual book I was writing as much as, well, my own tendencies and the market desires.

Let's talk about the issues I'm trying to resolve now:

- MC is progressing too slow. This is a plotting problem, especially for the series itself. I need to go back and resolve this.

   - side note on this, I'm also realising I didn't really figure out a good way of explaining progression and how people progress. Since I'm eschewing the usual 'kill monsters to get xp' route, i have to work on resolving this better.

- Lack of 'smart' decisions or exploitations by the MC. I'm realising I'm having the MC be a little too passive with his Skill, which is something I need to fix. Have actually a few cool ideas of how to do it, now that I worked out how.

- I'm disliking the other characters; or the lack of interaction / MCs interaction with them. I need to do something about this, but this ties in to the...

- Academy arc... might be too long. I'm realising as I'm fixing the portion of the MCs progression being too slow, that the academy arc as plotted becomes too long. There's no REASON for me to draw out the entire academy arc into three books... which means I need to fix it. That means rewriting / replotting the entire series, and maybe going from a 9 book series to maybe... 5? 

- I'm actually thinking a 5 book series is cool and might be a nice change of pace. I could, potentially, extend the series to a 7 book series instead of 5, depending on how well the series works; but 5 books if written well might be a better option. It'll let me get through my ideas faster and, if the series doesn't sell super well, still mean I can end it pretty fast. I might even write the first book as a standalone with series potential kind of thing...

These are all things that, after consideration, I'm sure I can fix. I just need to work out how, but... in resolving them in my brain and rewriting them, I have to look at all the chapters I have written, all the various scenes. And there's a lot - 96k words, 65 different chapters...

And work out what needs to be removed, what needs to be taken out and what can stay. 

So, that's where I am. Unable to progress with the words right now, because I have to decide which chapters can stay, whether to go back to the start and just begin rewriting / editing immediately; or resolving the backend enough that I can start writing the next series of chapters and then resolving the major conflict (basically 3 different plots!) later. 

I also need to work out the proper ending of the book now, and part of that is deciding if I'm going to really resolve the entire academy arc in 1 book, which then makes the book itself a little bigger and fatter than ever. 

And all the while, remember - I have a massive deadline at the end of this month that needs to be hit.

After all, I still have:

- Immortal Connections (Celestial Cataclysms book 1) to finish. I'm only 1/2 done here (and boy, do I have a few rewrites and chapters to add)

- Climbing the Ranks book 3 to finish editing and book 4 to start (supposedly start of January)

- Editing of Magic Kingdom books 11 and 12 that have to be finished this month

- Short story for System Apocalypse to write from Dragoncon

- And probably a short for ATL too

All of which, hopefully, will be done by around end March or early April. 

So a lot of work to be done, not a lot of time to get it finished.