You all know the old saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” I had a plan to post an eighteen-chapter graphic novel without missing updates to catch up on writing. See, I had written the entire script to Draconis Wicked two years before the first pages were ever drawn. I write Urban Underbrush one chapter at a time (with a few grand plans and threads secretly tying things together) but since Draconis Wicked is one story with a definite ending, it just made more sense to write the whole thing first and draw it second. This way, I could weave certain themes through the story, drop hints at what’s ahead, and, of course, I’d never need to stop making new pages due to writer’s block.
As you may have noticed, I somehow managed to miss two updates in spite of all this prewriting. Shortly before I started drawing Chapter Five, I realized that I wanted to change the ending to Chapter Six. I won’t give anything away, but the end of Chapter Six used a device that was interesting, but perfectly unremarkable in the Draconis world. I wanted to use this device in another story instead, where it would be a major turning point and an irreplaceable piece of the plot (more on that some other day).
No big deal. I’d just swap the parts I wanted to save for later with similar devices and adjust the story that led up to it. Well, as soon as I took out the ending I realized that the rest of the chapter didn’t work. I don’t mean it didn’t work without the original ending. I mean it never worked. But that big finish was distracting and interesting enough to keep me from noticing. Now that I was forced to revisit Chapter SIx without the same finale, I could see that the plot was hollow, the character personalities weren’t quite right, and the whole thing seemed out of sync with the other chapters.
Members of the audience, you will never get to read Chapter Six in its original form. Never. Don’t go getting curious. Reading it will only make you sad.
Rewriting Chapter Six proved difficult. I wasn’t free to write whatever I felt like. Chapter Six had to accomplish certain goals, the most important one being that the end for the new Chapter Six still had to match up with the beginning of the old Chapter Seven. I found myself mentally pulling Chapter Six apart into it’s basic components. I put the parts I liked in one pile and threw the rest away. It took a few passes to put the pieces back together into a unified story. Gradually, I recognized exactly which moments were holding me back and which themes I should have been exploring all along.
Now that I’ve finished the new script for Chapter Six, I feel like it was well worth the time and even the delays. The new Chapter Six isn’t just “better than the old one,” “good for a repair job,” or “successfully patched all the holes.” It’s actually a good story. And if I’ve done my job, not only will you enjoy it, you won’t even know that it wasn’t a part of the original script.
Except I just told you.
Forget all that you read.
Marj
One thought on “Chapter Six and Pre-Writing”
Priya Sridhar
Lol, I need to learn about your revision techniques, Marj. For A La Mode I seem to make up as I go, and the plotting is not as tight as it could be. I look forward to what Chapters Six and Seven bring for Draconis and his merry band.