So. A 55,707 word first draft has turned into a 70,524 word rewrite over the course of another week and a bit. The climax has undergone three different revisions alone. It keeps getting better with every rewrite too.
Someone at my day job asked yesterday, “Yes, but is it any good?”
I don’t remember exactly how I responded, except that I wasn’t horrible and defensive about it – must have been in a good mood because it was Friday.
The story is good enough for me to want to improve it even more before I start showing it to strangers. I want to give it the best possible chance at success that I can give it, to ignore whatever attention-seeking mindset I once had that led me to shove a heap of undercrafted work into the world in order to get feedback and feed my ego. Beyond any intellectual curiosity or sense of social justice, I love these characters and their world to bits.
And that got me thinking…
The whole creative process on The Quiet One (henceforth TQ1) compared with working on the novel was so different. TQ1 was this amorphous and meandering kind of thing, mainly learning about the process of pre-production hands-on. At some point I got lost in Making Stuff Up without a strong sense of direction. The story and characters didn’t stand a chance – there were Worlds To Build!
Despite having not a great deal to show for it, TQ1 was still a crucially useful learning experience in terms of self-discovery: I sucked at drawing and that was frustrating; I rocked at sound design and that was helpful; I put a lot of energy into things that ended up being pre-production experiments and artefacts simply because I could, not because they were part of the goal. And there lay one crucially useful takeaway for me.
The Quiet One started with a story synopsis, and I never ever ever ever EVER intend to begin a project that way ever again. Synopses are just too vague for me as an anchor point, not that I seemed to realise it at the time. The many pages of concept art I drew, the languages I invented, the voice tracks I recorded.. I was too wrapped up in trying to craft a world around characters I didn’t know or really care about that much.
The novel, by contrast, started as the first line of the first draft, and everything grew from the first line of the first draft. It was invented on the fly in a fever of creativity, NaNoWriMo style. I had to keep it short-ish (around 50,000 words) or it would be too much of a handful to edit; whatever I didn’t like, I wrote intending to go back and fix what didn’t work, so I consciously had the freedom to screw up, explore dead ends and generally play. Along the way I got to meet my characters properly as vivid presences in my imagination.
By the end of the first draft I actually knew who my cast was, which spurred me on to fix all the inconsistencies from earlier in the rewrite during a second draft. I know how they fit together and interrelate and I know what their world is like.
I was at that point of familiarity after just two and a half weeks. Compare that with nearly six months with TQ1 staring at synopses and utlimately building worlds. My takeaway from all this is to meet some engaging characters having engaging experiences as early as possible in any given project, even if the characters and experiences are completely different one draft later.
Speaking of which..
In writing the novel, I used up all the time I would have otherwise spent making an image for BlenderGuru’s character compo. I was working on a Ktish image for it until I got fed up with all things The Quiet One and started something else. I’m not going to have anything for the competition in the end, but in getting my creativity focussed on character, the competition’s now given me half a dozen new imaginary friends to send through the pipeline over the next few months.
Simply put: I want to be able to have an idea, draw it, then create a 3D model that at least evokes the drawing. Achieving that goal has a lot of dependencies attached, but if I can do that, I’ll be laughing*.
* possibly not literally. It’s a turn of phrase.
