Wolf

My writing advice to anyone out there is to not do what I’m about to describe.

If you’re already deep into a novel, don’t add a new character to the core cast who needs to be written into most of the book.

I no longer remember when I realized this character was missing from the novel, but it was one of those flashes of insight that make you wonder how the novel even existed without her. Unfortunately, that also means some amount of rewriting for big chunks of the book.

As I’ve said before, this novel has a frame narrative and then there’s the bulk of the novel, which is a character telling the story. Well, the frame narrative was missing this character. And so while the frame narrative is currently, I think, probably 25k words–and growing!–it is considerably shorter than the story within the story, which is closer to 80k words. And while it’s easier to rewrite 25k words than it is to rewrite 80k words, it’s still a lot of work!

And not just because of wordcount but because the dynamics of a scene change a lot when you throw another person into it!

The work goes slower for this reason where the geometries of each scene change, especially since the character I’ve added is one of those big personalities. Which is also why she was so necessary to this frame narrative. She’s a destabilizing aspect to the narrative, to these characters, and I quite like that.

Quite need that.

But on and on we go and I just got to write one of my favorite scenes by changing a scene I already really loved.