I guess I'm not alone. Most of my own needs tinkering before I'm ready to post it, other than a usual proofing and checking for errors. The tinkering I refer to is where a section needs rewriting because of continuity. What's happened over the past few days goes beyond that.
Half of chapter 31 was completely rewritten in order to change the location of part of the story and those present. 1500 words were scrapped and recreated, it was too much work to edit what was there. I'm now working on chapter 32 and am in the midst of another massive rewrite. Thankfully I have the time to do this, especially as I want to start 33 before anyone sees 32!
I suppose the moment you have more than two characters in a scene the dynamic changes, swap one of those characters and the dynamic is completely different, changing names is not enough. Hey ho!
Of course, I was going to work on this standalone idea I have, but the rewrite's taken all of that time.
Comments
I know what you mean
I know what you mean. the more characters you have the more personalities you have to keep track of. I used to play an RPG called CyberPunk. I thought it was great especially because of the character creation. there is a section for the character's backstory. For certain number of years things happened to the character. These instances shape the character's personality. In other games there is alignment and the character can do nothing outside the parameters of alignment, lest they become something else. In CyberPunk that's not so. they have loves, hatreds, addictions and psychosis. One year they win the lottery, the next they're in jail for petty theft. Perhaps all that time playing that game then has helped me now in my writings.
Now you sit there saying "ok Snowfall that's cool and all, but what's your real point?" Well that's kind of actually my point. Characters have personalities. They will do or say certain things in certain ways for very specific reasons. If you change one of the characters for another then the whole dynamic does change. They will see a situation and interpret it differently and then respond in a different manner than the original. one word can change a paragraph. One changed paragraph can change an entire line of daily events. And so on and so on. you get the idea now. That's why I think the two most critical parts of story writing are 1) concept and 2) character development. work both of those as much as you can before you write the words "Chapter 1". So yeah I can really relate to Shiraz' problem. For those that don't, maybe I helped you. Maybe I helped others. If I didn't, not much I can say about it. *hugs for Shiraz*
quidquid sum ego, et omnia mea semper; Ego me.
alecia Snowfall
Cyberpunk Char. Gen.
The rules for character generation in Cyberpunk 2020 are some of the best out there as far as I'm concerned and if you want to have a look at how the rules work the Datafortress 2020 has them here for the original rules and the Interlock Unlimited optimized rules are here. Several friends have actually used the rules for writing characters in their own stories just making modifications to the setting so as to have the characters fit into their story universe.
Re-writes?
You're right ... join the club! Been there, done that & bought the T-shirt. Hindsight is a nagging voice to most if not all authors even after a story is 'published'. It's a good thing you made the revision when you did.
PB
Yeah....
Worst kind of "rewrite" is "scrap and forget"... Happened to me couple of times... I still have some story ideas not yet in that place that just plainly resist to come through. One of them is cruelly playing with my muse for more than 10 years. It is a SF story... World and FTL travel method are quite detailed... Story synopsis is quite ready... But of all of the characters only protagonist likes the story and cooperates... Others are just plainly resisting the story and idea in general. :-(
Another... Just waits for the first one to come through as idea is SF again, but a bit closer to RL, without any aliens or FTL travel....
I know exactly what you mean.
I know exactly what you mean...but at least you have the luxury of doing that before you have the entire story written. I had to remove two characters from two separate stories and in doing so had to line for line change dialog then change a few scenes to fit the dialog and it was before I even got down to fixing the other scenes where they weren't included. A pain in the neck when the stories are 77,000 and 69,000 words long :(
I'm told STFU more times in a day than most people get told in a lifetime