not quite done yet...

[edenfalling]

The problem with deciding at nearly the last minute that the reason two chapters you've been consistently unhappy with aren't working is that they shouldn't exist at all, is that you have to pick apart and reconstruct all the other chapters now that you've removed some of their supports.

I feel like I am playing Jenga with phrases and plot elements. One wrong move will bring everything crashing down.

...

It really does work better without those chapters, though. The arc is much tighter and the focus is more securely on the main characters.

(I'll have the story up some time this evening.)

Comments

[autumnia]

Oh, I know how that feels and I sympathize.. I've got one of those types of chapters in a WIP and having rewritten it, it works better though I do think the best idea would be to remove it completely. The drawback to doing so would then require a lot of expository conversations in a later chapter so it's a no-win either way.

On the plus side, this means I get to re-read Courting Dance and it'll seem like new. :-)

[edenfalling]

Sometimes there is no good solution. :/

Anyway, what I'd done was outline (and write terrible rough drafts of) two chapters centering almost entirely on Archen politics -- one in Lune's POV while Aravis and Cor were still in Narnia, and one in Corin's POV to resolve his argument with Cor and show that he'd come around about the Aravis/Cor marriage. And they were utter filler. All Lune was really doing was officially calling the Great Council (and reflecting on his failings as a father), and the Corin chapter was just me scuffing my feet because I was afraid of writing the part where Aravis speaks to the Great Council.

Those two chapters changed the story tone into one that demanded pages and pages of detailed political maneuvering to resolve the vote, which I didn't want to write. Worse, they stole focus from Aravis and Cor, and it's generally a bad idea to do that to your central romantic couple. *wry* So I cut them, and then had to make sure I got all the necessary information across elsewhere (this was particularly annoying with two OC political opposition characters) and rewrote Aravis's final chapter to ditch the stuff I'd intensely disliked about it and steal parts of ch. 3 to paper over the gap.

Now the story has an almost literal deus ex machina at the end instead, but I figure that is totally in keeping with canon and I don't care. (Also I got in my one image I'd been aiming for since I first attempted to make an outline years ago, so that's nice, even if I did end up downplaying it more than I expected.)