The Writing Process 5: Paradigm Shift

Ficathon, fourth draft (Rich-text file)
Ficathon, fifth draft (Rich-text file)

The more astute observers will note that my fourth draft looks almost exactly the same as my second draft. At that point, I believed that it was still possible to salvage the earlier versions by making alterations to the general atmosphere.

The fourth draft went as far as to directly record Kazuo's perceptions of the box, giving the reader an idea that whatever was in the box would eventually be important to the story. The added atmosphere didn't seem to change the story's quality, though, and I found myself still stuck at exactly the same point I encountered in the earlier drafts.

So when the time for the fifth draft rolled around, I figured that, if I was going to go for a change in atmosphere, I was going to try taking it to the extreme. I shifted gears and set the story in a more modern-world L5R setting as opposed to a medieval-Japanese-like universe.

It seemed to work for a while - what interested me was the fact that Kazuo's personally seemed to come out in the course of the draft. The fact that the package had now been replaced by a sixteen-wheeler cargo truck being driven by a non-union driver was icing on the cake. There's just something that feels good about converting aspects of fantsy literature into other worlds in this way.

Nishi (a bit player in the original drafts) became an interesting character to write, mostly because his mannerisms came out very well. He didn't make it past this draft, unfortunately, but I'll probably see if I can write him into some other story in the future. A samurai trucker is too weird a concept to waste. :)

Around the time I hit page three of the fifth draft, I realized that I hadn't even gotten to the main story yet. I went back, read through the long expository introduction, and decided to speed things up a little. So at that precise moment in the middle of the story, Kazuo, Seiki and Nishi run into the abandoned car that's blocking the road.

The doubts were creeping into my mind already, though. If I wanted to write a short story, why would I bother spending three pages on exposition, only to dive into the climactic ending all too suddenly? The quickest solution to this, of course, was to cut some of the opening story, but I respected the character conversations too much to touch it.

The final straw came when I did a wordcount. Of the recommended 500- to 2000-word limit, the exposition alone took up over a thousand words. Too much for my taste, and it was obvious that I was spending waaaaay too much time on the story setup.

For the next draft, then, the goals were pretty clear. I wanted to shorten the exposition to such a point where the climax would take up most of the reader's attention, and yet not cut it so hard that one wouldn't flow smoothly into the other.

As with a number of measures I take with rewrites, I took it to the extreme:

What if the story started near the ending?