MOPNoWriMo Day 6: Rinse and Repeat (4/2/2012)

Day six: Target wordcount: 32000. Words written: 32000

(Counts switched to running totals, as I finally ‘fessed up to cheating a bit yesterday)

The first act is finished. About a third of the planned second act has vanished in a smoking hole of unexpected narrative decisions, but on the whole, it’s not too bad. It has a prologue, of course because all my stories have prologues, almost none of which survive the editor. Just for fun I’ve given the second act a prologue too, and that probably won’t survive either. This is a first draft, though, so some serious pruning during the rewrite is to be expected.

Speaking of which: It may be a problem particular to the books that are the sequels to something else, but I’ve noticed something about the “infodump.” In this case, the infodump in question is the recap of what happened in the previous book that is relevant and necessary to the events about to unfold, but I think I’d make the same comment about infodumps in general, especially ones about the workings of the world. It’s possible that in Chromium there are currently four different places in which some character explains to another character, or else muses internally, on certain previous events. Splitting it like that goes some way to avoid the “look, here’s a synopsis of the previous book” chapters which I personally don’t like while keeping each “mini-dump” feeling so natural and unobtrusive that the reader barely notices. Or so goes the plan. What I notice now looking back is that these overlap quite a lot. The same things are being repeated more than once. It’s not quite as bad as every protagonist having to introduce herself to every other by speaking out the litany of her deeds, but it’s definitely pretty grim. This, my friends, is what rewrites are for – rewrites will make it all better. Believe in the rewrites. For this first draft, the hand having writ moves ever on, never back, not if you want to be done in a month. I shall come back to rewrites a little later, but I’ve talked about first drafts before.

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