One thing I’ve come to slowly realize during the course of writing these annotations is how often I prefer to dramatize moments that could’ve been summarized instead.
Take the moment Rahelu turns and sees Nheras arriving. This could’ve been covered in a brief sentence:
Rahelu turned to see Nheras of Ilyn gliding up the gentle slope, her willowy form bedecked in a dazzling array of gold and silk.
Those 24 words do the job of conveying the physical action, with a little description thrown in to make sure we’re not in white room territory.
I don’t like it though. There’s no sense of conflict because there’s an absence of Rahelu’s interiority—the prose is trying too hard to conjure a “mental movie” by focusing on what Rahelu sees, instead of leaning into the advantage of prose as a medium, which allows us to really get inside Rahelu’s head and feel what she feels.
By this point of the story, we have a very clear idea of who Rahelu is and what her priorities are. We’ve also seen what she’s up against in the society she lives in, and there’s just the one antagonist left to face. Since I’m not in the habit of writing ineffective antagonists, I knew Nheras would “win” whatever confrontation was about to occur at the Ideth party. We’ve left the familiar environs of the Lowdocks and the Guild and entered the world of House-born society; Rahelu has no chance of beating Nheras at her own game.
At the same time, this is the end of Book 1, not the start of Book 2. Rahelu now is not the same person she was at the beginning of the book.
(Sidebar: it’s been interesting seeing reader reactions on whether they consider Rahelu to have had a character arc in this book. Outwardly, it may seem as though she hasn’t changed—though Rahelu has improved her station, she’s still impulsive and prone to anger—but while she hasn’t grown any wiser, she has developed a sense of self-worth.)
How to convey that?
Well, for starters, even though she’s making the same decision—to stand up to Nheras—she’s going about it differently. Neither character will throw a single punch but this long verbal confrontation is structured like a fight scene; when the dialogue starts, I want the exchange to be focused on the blows being dealt and which ones are landing.
So here’s what I did (the part I’ve snipped out is a long description of Nheras and how she is dressed):
Footsteps crunched on the fine gravel behind her, each one accompanied by a lighter, metallic jingle. Rahelu wheeled around in a defensive stance, every muscle tensed, to face Nheras of Ilyn as she made her way up the winding path.
[…]
Rahelu did not budge; she held her stance, turning warily to keep Nheras in view as the Ilyn girl climbed the last few strides to the top.
It was probably unnecessary. Nheras wouldn’t attack her, here in the heart of the Ideth estate. And even if she did, one good shove from Rahelu was all it would take to unbalance the Ilyn girl and send her toppling down the hill in a flurry of gold robes and jeweled bangles. Nheras had taken such great pains with her appearance—it had to have taken spans and spans—that she would probably want to die on the spot if so much as a single hair were out of place.
If Rahelu felt out of place and inadequate, showing up in her utterly ordinary attire, she could only imagine the humiliation and rage Nheras would feel if she had to choose between showing up in torn, dirtied robes with her hair and makeup in disarray; or missing a large portion of the festivities in order to go home, fix her appearance and return.
Come to think of it, Rahelu knew exactly how that would feel. She looked at the other girl, mincing her way up the gravel path with severely shortened strides thanks to those ridiculous sandals, and thought about yanking Nheras off balance by grabbing her by that delicate sheer outer robe and tearing it to pieces, wondering if cloth-of-gold would tear as easily as parchment.
The thought was tempting. Very tempting. Tempting enough that Rahelu straightened out of her defensive stance and shifted half her weight forward.
But Nheras had reached the top now, and Rahelu no longer had the luxury of being at eye-level with the other girl—she was forced to look up.
Even taking just the first line on its own, this is better writing. Instead of passive reportage, we get active reaction. Rahelu’s not just standing there, watching; she’s responding to Nheras’s arrival by falling into a defensive combat stance. Not only do we have a sense of impending conflict, we also get a much clearer sense of the dynamic between these two characters.
But why keep going with all the other words?
To show an emotional arc. Rahelu sees her rival, she has an emotional reaction, she considers a course of action thanks to that emotion, begins to act on it…but then is prevented from doing so by an action from Nheras.
The verbal sparring hasn’t started yet, but the conflict has already begun.
That’s all well and good, but I’ve taken 300-something words to basically say “Nheras arrived”. The way the arc is structured is…fine, but the prose doesn’t go deep enough. There’s still a sense of distance present.
Here’s the same moment in the published version:
Footsteps crunched on the fine gravel behind her, each one accompanied by a lighter, metallic jingle.
Rahelu wheeled around, every muscle tensed, to face Nheras of Ilyn.
[…]
Rahelu held her defensive stance, turning warily to keep Nheras in view as the Ilyn girl climbed the last few strides to the top.
It was unnecessary. Nheras wouldn’t attack her here, in the heart of the Ideth estate. And even if she did, one good shove was all it would take to topple her over in a flurry of gold robes and jeweled bangles.
Rahelu looked at the other girl, mincing her way up the gravel path with severely shortened strides thanks to those comically high-heeled sandals.
Wondered if that delicate, sheer, cloth-of-gold outer robe would tear as easily as parchment.
Imagined the humiliation Nheras would feel if her arrival was announced by a shrieking, maladroit tumble down the hill; the rage when her long-planned grand entrance was spoiled by the ruinous disarray of robes and hair and makeup.
An intoxicating blend of emotions that was all the more tempting for its familiarity. Sweet and thick and strange, when you weren’t the one caught in its maelstrom.
Rahelu shifted half her weight forward.
But Nheras had reached the top now…and Rahelu was forced to look up.
Anything that could be deleted without lessening the emotional arc, I deleted. Anything that could be said in fewer words and retain/intensify the emotional impact, I changed.
When I finished line edits on this section, I distinctly remember sitting back, mind-blown by how something significantly shorter can read so much better.
It was also the first time I could articulate why.
Probably the most interesting and fun part of these later annotations is I get to reflect on decisions I made as a less experienced writer, since I’m doing them so long after the fact. Petition is a much better written book than my first “fix fic” novel is, and Supplicant, I hope, is just as much of an improvement upon Petition.
Looking back on this passage after having published the sequel, I think there’s still more distance than I would prefer, due to the self-consciousness in Rahelu’s narration that comes from the overt manner in how her thoughts are spelled out and structured. It still works, but that was the limit of where I was as a writer back then.
If I were to write this today, I think I would write it differently—be less clean and structured, elide more, change up sentence length and pacing, drop the distance, go further into free indirect speech, add more voice, etc. The last para in the introspection arc, right before Rahelu shifts her weight, is probably closest to the style and approach I would take now.
I wonder how much that will change, if I were to revisit this after publishing Book 3?
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