Mahalobay

In the initial early drafts of Abundance, because we were still shaping the universe that we were going to be writing in, we went into detail on quite a few chapters. It helped us flesh out the characters, defined their interactions better, and gave us a clearer insight into their selves.

Once the draft is complete, however, and you can see your story from end to end, some things become more important, and you know you have to flesh them out further. Other things – while great as character-building chapters – become overly long, sometimes disrupting the pacing.

A good example of this is the prologue in Abundance. Older drafts of this prologue consisted of entire chapters that went into detail on Carol and the crew of the Frontier. We organically developed Carol’s personality and laid down six chapters and something like 25-30 pages that would serve as the catalyst for the rest of the book.

This length made the beginning of the book somewhat unwieldy and mismatched against the pacing of the rest of the chapters in the book. We loved these chapters, however, and the humanity that we were able to inject into Carol and the crew, and so we held on to them for the longest time.

Eventually it became apparent that 25 pages before the book actually started was not the greatest way to go. I cried and fretted over how to trim this down, and tried unsuccessfully a few times to trim it. The way that the chapters were structured made just a straightforward trim difficult… and I didn’t want to lose the humanity in those chapters.

The idea for the chapter as it currently stands in the book was a shower thought. It slapped me in the face and I had to finish up as fast as I could so that I could rush out and jot things down. It incorporates some (most) of the important moments in the six chapter saga as a flow of thoughts, and builds a wholly new chapter structure that works in the context and pacing of the book. It literally refocuses the way Carol’s story is told, while condensing 6 chapters/25 pages into a single 7 page chapter. I love this chapter as much as I loved the previous six.

Killing your darlings is difficult. Take lots of showers.

If you’ve read the book, I’d love to hear your take on this!