And so, I spent the weekend doodling instead of writing.

The day before I was really on a roll – on Friday I hammered out 6000 words in two sittings, and that’s quite a bit of work.
In the meantime I got the revision of the first half back from my content editor.

Now, a lot of what he pointed out was already on my list, so I took it in stride – but he made a few other observations that were unexpected, and pointed out a number of problems.
And they are not word-problems – they are structural problems.
Or at least, they are problems whose solutions I think must be structural, not narrative¹.

Therefore, instead of writing, I spent the weekend doodling, and redesigning the structure of my novel.
I need to increase not the so much pace but the urgency of the story.
And also, some of the observations made me aware of some shortcomings in my world-building – once again not in terms of setting “errors”, but in a scarcity of informations. I need to tell more to the readers about the world in which my story is set.
And herein the dread infodump rears its ugly head.

In truth, I am not so averse to exposition – as Kim Stanley Robinson said, this is a science fiction story, there must come a point when I must tell you what’s going on.

The trick is, of course, to provide exposition and information in a fun way that will not break the narrative but – considering the need to increase the urgency – actually make action tighter and impress some acceleration to the story.

And so, I scrawled and doodled and redesigned the structure of my novel – of which a fair chunk of about 15.000 words are still missing for the first draft to be complete.
What I am planning is a set of narrative “flying buttresses“, so to speak, pylons and supports to uphold the story, widening the scope of the setting and providing informations in a concise, fun way, that will also drag the story forward at an increased speed.

Which of course means the 15.000 words will become 22.000, by necessity.
And this is just the first draft.
And the deadline looms closer.
And yet, it was not a wasted weekend.
Not at all.

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