20/10/2019 - Rite of Passage · 8:32am Oct 20th, 2019
Writing Moondust 2.0 has been a bit of a learning experience, to put it lightly. It's my first "completed" story, and it shows. What I thought would be a simple case of streamlining the plot of events and rewriting the last few chapters opened up a can of worms I hadn't been expecting. I'm now realising just how much I'm still missing as a writer when it comes to the absolute basics, stuff that I wouldn't have learned by only writing halfway through a story and then getting bored or demotivated.
We're talking the simplest of things like setup and payoff, character motivation, knowledge and opinion, making sure that there's an actual throughline between events and how those events relate to the characters. All of that to prevent the easy mistakes of having a passive main character, or events that "just happen" (Twilight's still a bit of a passive kind of character, but that's my intention for this first story so maybe it's ok). This whole process is also giving me a lot of experience rewriting stuff. I never used to think of separate drafts as something I needed or wanted, but now I can see what a fundamental effect one can have on the other, and that's something I'll definitely need going forward as things get more complex and more characters get introduced.
All in all, I now view Moondust as something of a rite of passage on the road to me becoming a more professional writer, now that I'm making the effort to learn the essentials.
Oh yes, and as for the story itself, I'm currently reworking the endings of chapters 4 and 6 for the reasons stated above. After that I'll move on to doing chapter 8 and we'll see how things go from there.
Yeah. I can respect the desire to keep improving on your work. And you bring up some really good points. While your story was good already thus far, I'm confident that you taking the time you are will make it even better.