The Craft of Writing

Reading through the iDrakula app that I mentioned earlier on this blog, I'm reminded once again that good storytelling isn't just plot, it's also presentation.

The plot of my World of Darkness fan fiction has been largely fixed for well over ten years, partly because I actually played Michael as a role-playing character through some of these adventures, but also because I filled in the gaps of his story a long time ago.

But the question that I've been struggling with over these past few months as I've put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as it were) is how to tell the plot that's been archived in my brain for all those years.

Every author has to answer that question. Bram Stroker chose to write Dracula as a series of journal entries, a move which inspired the app author to update the story in the way she did.

I had a plan to tell Michael's story via character point of view, very much like the way George R. R. Martin is writing The Song of Ice and Fire novels. You can see some of this in the first chapter of my fan fiction, which is told largely from Boar's point of view. Some of the chapters in Act Two are told from Rebecca's PoV also, but as I worked on the story more and more, I began to abandon this approach. Now most everything is told from Michael's viewpoint, although I stray from time to time to other characters to forward various plot points. This becomes more frequent in Act Two, which hasn't hit the website yet, but you can see it with Ernie's little spying expedition at the end of Chapter 7.

The question for me now is whether I keep these relics of my prior plan or rewrite them?

I think the Boar chapter works, the Ernie segment is small enough to not feel out of place, but the Rebecca chapters don't feel like they're working to me. Neither does the chapter before Rebecca makes her reappearance in the story. It was set up to introduce werewolves and mages into the story (I've since moved the mage introduction to the chapter I posted today) and was told largely from their point of view. It doesn't work, and still doesn't in my opinion.

A lot of this is academic to you, my readers, since you don't have any of the material I'm questioning at this point. But I wanted to give you a little glimpse into the creative process here. I know this is just a fan fiction, but I want to tell a good story. And if I'm to do that, these are the sorts of things I have to wrestle with.

And I need to resolve this quick, because I'm quickly running out of Act One material to publish. Only a couple more chapters to go.