Yoink!

During our read-through of Novel #4 we diagnosed several problems, and have been working to fix them ever since. Unfortunately for one of our characters (we’ll call him Mr X), the prescribed remedy calls for him to longer be a Point of View character. He’s still in the story, and (sad to say) suffers through pretty much the same series of unfortunate events, it’s just that now we don’t get to hear his side of it. He’s a bit miffed at us for silencing him.

A potential upside, from Mr X’s perspective, is that his plot line is now slightly less complicated, which will make his time in the story a smidgen less unpleasant. For Rune Skelley characters, that’s really the best they can hope for: a smidgen less unpleasant.

One of the reasons X got the rug yanked out from under him is that he only had a couple of POV scenes to begin with. We determined that the reader needed more insight into another character (to highlight our creativity we’ll call him Mr Z), which meant making him a POV character. X and Z shared most of their scenes, so it made perfect sense to simply shine the spotlight in the other direction.

That doesn’t mean it was easy, though. Before we could make Z a star, we had to get to know him better. Firstly he got a new name. His original name was “borrowed” from an unpleasant person we dealt with long ago. In the years since, our anger at this person faded and it became less important to do horrible things to his effigy. We also thought better of name-checking an actual living person. So, Z got a new name, and then he and Kent spent some quality time together, discovering what it was like inside Z’s head. Kent emerged unscathed, and now the novel is all the richer.

Swapping Messrs X and Z on POV-duty will make the novel better, which is good because it’s making a lot of extra work. It was among the discoveries we made by retroactively laying out a rainbow for this book, because it showed us in living color that we hadn’t made proper use of Mr X and also highlighted how important Mr Z’s state of mind was to the climax. Even so, it took walking a few laps around the neighborhood to really make up our minds that it was the right move. A writing partner helps you through tough decisions, so you know that all the rework entailed by a major change is really taking you in the right direction.