BMAS Brogress Bost #3 (Patreon)

Hi, so it's now been a month of rewriting Between Music And Silence (which I may rename to Between Song And Silence, unless I can finally find a name that has inherent intrigue.)

I've now rewritten the most weak part of the book and propped it up, which was the first half of Act 2. One of the chapters finally got split into two and finished its mitosis. The rewrite feels like turning a fuzzy, black and white film into a colorized version. All the emotions are sharpened up.

The journey matters as much as the destination, and that's been my main focus. So my main two goals of improvement have been #1. Characters and #2 Style and presentation.

The most helpful realization I've had is that I should be treating each chapter as its own self-contained episode. Well, I was doing that already, but only in terms of the plot: "This is the chapter where the characters go through this trial". I wasn't considering mini, chapter-sized character arcs and mini themes and hooks. Each chapter felt like a series of disjointed events.

Now I'm imagining someone sampling each chapter out of my book with no context and if it would feel satisfying. I acted like breaking the story into chapters would automatically give it extra momentum. But the result was that I was using chapter breaks like spurring on a horse. "Yah! Yah!" With no actual effect.

That got me into this mindset of creating little payoffs that make the journey fulfilling in the short term, and it even opens my mind up to techniques that feel cinematic, like focusing on the same image or phrase at the beginning and end of a chapter just to tie it together. This kind of thing was really impossible to fathom when I was using all my brain power just to figure out what should happen next.

I've also realized that I'm in love with the "Omniscient" point of view narration, so I'm fully embracing it, and it allows me to do something like this

Now, I'm at the finale of Act 2, and I'm currently at a block or a crossroads, reconsidering how I should pay off all the twists and set-ups. Often, getting hung up on one simple question (which right now is a plot device that doesn't make enough sense) leads to bringing up more questions, until I am wondering about the effectiveness of the entire story, wondering where I might have been able to go a different direction with it in the first place. But I should probably just keep going with this shabby plot device if it's worth it. Writing to the end of the book is going to be interesting from this point on, since I'll be treading a lot of new ground either way.