Revisions and Reminiscence - Chapters 4 and 5 · 6:25am Mar 27th, 2020
Almost 15,000 words in before the main characters actually speak to each other in the present. I'd call this story a slow boil, but you could probably heat up noodles with a damn flashlight faster than conflicts do with my own writing!
Anyway, Chapters 4 and 5 of EG:BFF have undergone their sweeping edits. On the whole, not much needed to be done beyond some basic corrections and a few bits of restructuring. Thankfully, in chapters that rely heavily on dialogue to advance things, I'm usually quite pleased with how consistent the characters sound and act right from the first draft, which often makes major edits unnecessary.
The funny thing about these chapters is that they were originally meant to be a single entity. In fact, if you cut out the last few sentences of Chapter 4, as well as the first third of Chapter 5, you can pretty much see how it was all originally intended to play out. Ideally, I wanted the entirety of Applejack and Rarity's conversation to be covered in one clean sweep; however, the number of rewrites Chapter 4 underwent—not to mention the persisting fear that their conversation was getting a bit drawn out—made me decide to just split the whole thing up into two parts. In hindsight, this really didn't achieve anything. Whether it spanned one chapter or one-hundred of them, the fact is that the audience is still reading about this singular interaction from start to finish without any break in-between. So much for stopping things from lingering too long.
That said, I'm still ultimately pleased with how these chapters turned out. There's a bit of humor, a load of drama, and little instances of budding romance peppered throughout. I also quite liked how the splitting of these chapters necessitated something as appealingly cheesy as a facetime-based tea date to bridge everything together.
Speaking of, I'm also enjoying how the affection between these two characters is playing out so far. As were my intentions from the start, Applejack's feelings seem to be coming into focus faster than Rarity's, but they don't serve as the sole driving force between their relationship. If there's one thing that I don't particularly care for in stories, it's when a romance feels rather lopsided. Not that affection cannot be earned or developed from an initially uninterested party, but in my experience, love is a gradual back-and-forth—a scale that takes time to find its proper balance as both sides are steadily added onto and subtracted from with varying weights of affection and desire. At the very least, that's how I intend to portray this story's core relationship, no matter how much of a slow boil it may require.
Well, if my future self continues to develop things according to the original vision, then everything should fit into place nicely by the end. Speaking of, I'm especially looking forward to editing Chapter 6, as I know for a fact that it desperately needs quite a bit of tightening up.
