Faith in the Family, Draft 1, 1.5, Outine, CH 1 (Patreon)

Faith in the Family, Commentary, CH 1

I’m going to try something with this series. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it for every chapter both because of potential time constraints and running out of things to talk about, but this series offers me an interesting situation.

Normally, I have nothing to comment on my series, because I write a chapter and move on to the next one. I won’t say I ‘forget’ what I wrote, but it’s certainly no longer clear, so I couldn’t talk about my reasoning for making this choice or that. But with Ben rewriting the chapter, and then, going over it and adding comments (they are not included because one of the process I put his chapter through to clean it up strips the comments out) and me reading the chapter forced me to evaluate his choices and recall my own.

So I’m going to try and add a commentary. The main thing this means is that the file is only available as an attachment. Hopefully that will not be too disruptive, but with having the chapter twice, plus the outline, it would make the post itself unwieldly. I have left the comments in the outlines because I didn’t run those through any clean-up.

Okay, so opening word for the commentary.

Man, is Mine and Ben’s writing style different. the story takes place in the world of Inheriting the Line, but 95% of the characters are Ben’s creation. Mine only show up here and there as the story dictates.

The first thing I noticed was how Thomas, the main character if very different of most of the ones I put on the page, mainly he had self esteem issues. I might write characters who aren’t confident, but it because they done consider themselves right for what’s going on, not because they think they aren’t ‘worth it’. That might be my biggest struggle with Thomas, remembering he lacks self confidence.

Another aspect is the locations. I tend to avoid detailed ‘real’ locations because I hate research. I usually get by with generalities. Except this time we’re in a university, a specific one. Full disclosure. I did not go to university. I have no idea how they work, so you’ll see that in my draft, and then ben fix it in his. Also, a lot of location details are something I add in my second draft.

Okay, on to the chapter itself.

The first thing you’ll notice when you look at the outline, is that the story actually start with what should have been chapter 4. The outline is 54 chapters long, and they are big chapters, and because this is part of an existing series, I want to keep it in the same format, so I’m hoping to the books them under 150k words. So I am hoping to be able to condense chapters together here and there. And the first 3 chapters, as interesting as they are in the outline, were primarily back story establishing who Thomas is, what he’s about, and his home life. all things I am confident I can slip in here and there as we tell the story.

One of the things you’ll notice in Ben’s version of the chapter is that he tends to remember there are other people in the MC’s life, while I tend to forget about them. Thomas’s brother and sister often get reduce to an occasional mention every four or five chapters, unless they have an active role, when I write, not to say anything of Thomas’s friends, which I just plain forget exist because they’ve moved out of the city.

Another detail that shifts between writing is that I like to hint at mindset, instead of outright telling it. So we established that Thomas tends to avoid problems, so I had established him taking a step back in preparation to run anytime he was surprised, or upset. Just that, the mention of him taking a step back. Ben removed it, and I checked it’s more about it being something he didn’t focus on and not something he didn’t want to see, so I’ll bring it back in draft 2

I’m also not always as clear as I think I am in my drafts (but I knew that already from comments my editor had made on other books)

Another thing I tend to do is over-think, for example, the clipboard.

That’s about it for the chapter itself.

A detail you wont notice because it’s part of me cleaning it up, Ben had a tendency of shifting tense as he writes. It makes for amusing reading.

Another detail that you won’t outright get because it only came up in the comments, and those have been stripped out, is that I dislike naming ‘conditions’. The main reason is that once I’ve named it, I have set expectations in your mind. And not everyone thinks the same things when we say a label.

The example I’ll use if Paul. Paul is Demi-Sexual. When Ben told me that, he had to explain what that meant, because while I’d heard it before, I’d never looked into it. Knowing it, I’ve made sure to have Paul act in a way that’s consistent with that, but I haven’t named it. It might get named eventually, but it will be in a situation that makes sense, and by a character, not the narrator.

For those who have read the Inheriting the Line books, you will notice another “condition” I do something similar with.

And that’s it.

For this chapter at least.

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