So...How Hard Can It Be?

Book three (which is still untitled!) is coming along nicely; this new computer is holding up very well. And now I want to take a little break. So...back to my story.

The Path of the Sword was all snug in its file folder. It was rough and most certainly not ready to be seen by anyone but its daddy, but it was done and tucked safely away. I left it alone; I let it rest (piece of advice: never wake a sleeping baby!).

I'd learned something from Stephen King's book, On Writing. In it, he suggested that, when you're done the first draft, don't look at it--don't even think about it--for a few weeks. He maintained that, if you can put it out of your head then, when you return to it, it'll be with a little more distance and you might be able to view it with a little more objectivity.

So, the baby slept comfortably for a few weeks.

And I opened another blank document, and started jotting down notes for Blood of War.

Of course, I already knew the general direction Blood of War would take--just as I knew what direction book three had to take. I just had to make sure I chose the right route.

I didn't.

Based on my notes, I wrote about four hundred pages, each one harder than the previous. By the time I had gotten to about page three hundred, it was a slog to even manage a page a day--a little down from the ten or so a day I started at. I didn't know why it was so hard; I didn't know what was wrong.

Until I decided to go back and reread it.

Let me tell you something about the very first draft of Blood of War: It was atrocious! It was so bad that it will never see the light of day. It was so bad I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or burn my still shiny netbook. It was so bad...

You get the idea.

Let me clarify. The writing wasn't that bad. It needed polish, a good spit-shine in places, but it was readable. No, that wasn't the problem. The story. The story was the problem. If you've read Blood of War then you know that, at one point, Jurel does something pretty damned cowardly. Something that you might hate him a little bit for (It's okay; I did, too). He had reasons, but it was still a pretty terrible thing.

In the first version, he does the same terrible thing...but the reasons that drove him to it, well, it was not Jurel. He would not have made that decision for those particular reasons.

And that's when it hit me. I didn't go wrong with the story per se. I went wrong because I was not honest. I forced Jurel to do something he would not normally have done to make the story go forward. And the entire thing ended up sucking because of it. I had to rewrite nearly three hundred pages.

I will never make that mistake again.

But before I could rewrite, I went back to The Path of the Sword. It had been several weeks so it was time, and now I had the added reason that I needed to think hard about Blood of War before I could move forward with it.