I Continue to Write

   I continue to work on the new (hopefully shippable) draft of Persistence of Memory. I always got held up very early on on revising Cailin's previous draft, because the first scene is more or less what it needs to be, so I focused just on revising the prose. Yesterday, however, I realized that the scene was still terrible, no matter how many sentences I rewrote. It was the substance that was flawed, not the style. The characterization was too flat to take the audience through the first few pages, for example. And the exposition was terrible. It was basically an infodump. In fact, it was an infodump.

   Exposition to a science fiction universe is hard enough. Exposition on a science fiction story that happens to be a mystery is even harder. The exposition of a science fiction mystery that has what equates to be an amnesiac as the main character?

   At least he knows just as much if not less about the universe than the audience.

   And, at least in our case, he knows what the mystery is. Right there. And he explains it to us. Right there. In all drafts of the story, the primary exposition takes place in the form of a letter, or something of a journal entry, that Rem's writing. The letter explains the mystery. Looking at this now, I realize how terrifically infodumpy this is. That's got to go.

   We're keeping the letter format, since it because a pretty major plot point later on, but I'm switching its location now to the beginning, so that it becomes the first thing the audience reads. Which was how I envisioned it originally, but isn't how it got written for some reason. Having it be in the middle of the scene, as Cailin had it, is basically looking over Rem's shoulder as he writes; it's an actual part of the scene. Since it's a letter, there's really no subtle way of doing this, so here it feels like exposition. Infodump. At the beginning of the chapter, however, it becomes a question set up for the audience, to be answered later. Hopefully. Either way, it's better this way, quite imaginably.

   I feel like we should be ready to push it onto publishers with this draft. For real this time. We sent out the earlier infodumpy draft, which was summarily rejected, two years ago. It hasn't been that long, comparatively speaking, since we came up with the universe, characters, and story, but I already feel like I'm a much better writer now than then. Maybe that's just because I was going through a really pretentious stage in Sophomore year high school. Dag, how long ago was that. Four years? It's a whole fifth of my life. That's almost a quarter. Wow. No wonder I was able to improve so much.