T. K. Arispe

Today's writing notes:

Working on: Skydwellers third edition

Kieri totally sounds like Apple Bloom in my head. Cannot unhear.

I've been cutting out a lot of unnecessary conversation here and there. One thing I noticed about this manuscript is that I tended to include a lot of mundane exchanges between characters that did nothing to advance the plot or character development, or expand on the world--for example, I cut out a brief part in Chapter 11 where Rohui and Wilder discuss Wilder's ignorance of taxonomy, because it was inconsequential, and we're already well aware by that point that Rohui knows a lot of things that Wilder doesn't.

I also snipped a lot of bits and pieces that just bogged down the pacing of the prose and had absolutely no purpose, such as brief lines of dialogue where Wilder gets confused about things Rohui says. While little bits of speech like this do happen all the time in real life, in fiction writing I find that they just interrupt the pacing and muddle the train of plot that the reader is supposed to be following. So I think it's perfectly okay to have fictional conversations be more streamlined than they probably would be in real life.

There are also a lot of minor actions that really don't need to be there, such as most of the times a character looks at another character, sighs, or smirks--there is so much unnecessary smirking in this story and it's driving me crazy, haha. I used to think that I had to describe every single thing a character did, but now I understand that - like pretty much everything else in storytelling - you only need to describe a character's actions if they're meaningful to the story. Everything else can be safely left out, and it will help your story flow better.

Annnddd we're down to 75,000 words! I am only celebrating this because in this project's case, less words equals less useless prose.