Finding The False Note

Now that I've posted my chapters and placed my reward order to CandyMafia, it's time to talk about one particular part of the writing process and why it hung me up so badly and why I need to recall how to handle this issue in the future even faster next time.

Back when I was on Tumblr, a solid piece of writing advice crossed my dashboard. It was something to the tune of: If you are stuck and you can't move forward at all, then go backwards in your story until you find the false note. Erase everything after the false note, and try something completely different.

I hate this with the loathing of an arachnophobe about to enter the insect display at the Zoo. Mostly because it's correct about half the time.

In writing Remara and the Musicians' Daughters, there were plenty of places where I got lower-case "s" stuck, but the place where I got Stuck was after Rosin shouted, "I hate you!" and ran off into the night. After that, I delved into descriptions of the forest at night, let Rosin slowly come to her senses, and watched her get properly scared of what might be out there around her. Then, Remara began to call her out of the forest. Remara herself could not enter, because she would torch the whole forest if she did, but she gave Rosin a point of light and sound to follow out. After that, Rosin and Remara had a heartfelt conversation that answered all the questions that had been raised by the story and... and... and...

It. Was. All. Wrong.

I kept pushing forward. I was a good 3,000 words into this segment and there were some wonderful parts and it just had to reach some place that pulled it all together and let it make sense! Yet the further I pushed, the more out-of-place this section felt to me. Something had gone wrong in the process, but I didn't want to look at it because I'd been working on this chapter for months and I wanted to be done already and when was I going to get my lemon jolly ranchers anyway???

Finally, I made myself look at it to see where the false note was. When I looked, I discovered the false note was the entire conversation with Remara.

From the beginning I wanted this chapter to be different. In this one, I wanted Remara to be a background character around whom things happened. Remara tends to dominate any conversation she's in, unless the other person gets extra angry or aggressive, so it's difficult for quieter characters to make themselves heard around her. I wanted to play with the idea of Remara, who speaks end-to-end-to-end sentences, being completely silent and mostly still.

I also wanted to explore very old, personal feelings in a fictional setting. My memory is fuzzy, so I can only hope that I behaved better in my own reality than Rosin did in hers. However, as I dream-walked my way through the story and let the words bubble up, I concluded that Rosin is likely any unexpressed anger or resentment I had as a child. This story was meant to explore themes of loneliness, feelings of isolation, and difficulty in communication for both Rosin and Bow, who are reflections of myself and my middle sister, Bonnie. It is the themes and the relational progression, not specific instances, that hold true, though a certain unique ability to hear also holds true.

So the story was about Rosin and Bow. The moment Rosin and Remara began having a conversation, the story became about Remara. It's impossible to keep Remara from dominating a conversation and with the amount of words she pours out, it's too easy to make her answer every question I raised in the story all at once in a super-obvious way. She was distressed and melodramatic, and while that's okay because that's part of who she is, it wasn't okay for this chapter.

I had to backtrack. I had to ditch 3,000+ words. I had to delete sentences I really liked. It was all wrong.

I came back to the end of the section where Rosin yelled, "I hate you!" and ran off, then I started a new section where she was found the next morning by a search party. Her conversation with Remara was alluded to in bits and pieces throughout the rest of the story. The revelation of that conversation was part of what pulled Rosin and Bow back together. Most of that conversation will never be known, and yes, it was much longer than the tidbits that Rosin shared. Remara said many things that Rosin needed to hear and kept in her own heart, but Rosin did share the things Bow needed to hear. That way, Remara stayed in the background like she was supposed to and the story revolved around the characters I'd chosen as the focus.

I remember having to do this a long, long time ago in a fanfiction called Sempadinum. It is the fourth fanfiction in a six-story Invader Zim saga. I introduced a ticking time bomb into the plot and had the main character, Zim, working on a way to evacuate as many humans from the planet as he could. In the middle of that process, a rather fearsome character he knew--Gaz--showed up and demanded he drop everything to take care of a rather broken character named Gloria that Zim owed a lot to. At first, I allowed him to capitulate because he was so afraid of Gaz and SOMEBODY had to be there for Gloria, but everything after that point read wrong. In fact, the first person to read and review the chapter told me so.

Well the bonding between Gloria and Zim seemed a bit forced in my opinion.

It is the first time I took a chapter down after I'd already published it. The rewrite had Zim refusing to cave to Gaz even though it was hard for him because he absolutely KNEW that the priority was dealing with the ticking time bomb. No way would he be able to concentrate on Gloria if the fate of the entire planet was at stake. After I established that, the character who stepped into that gap to help Gloria through her situation turned out to be the character who was really supposed to be there for Gloria all along and it furthered the plot in exactly the right direction.

Finding the false note is a powerful curative, but sometimes it involves slicing off a literary limb to get back on track. Even so, every time I've done it, the story has rewarded me with beautiful resolutions that I couldn't have forced from it down the path I was trying.