Following on from the advice I am slowly (and continuously) gleaning and incorporating into my fiction writing repertoire, I've spent some time considering Tarreck's story at a more summarised level. Each chapter considered as a whole, and then the parts within.
It isn't enough to have these changes enhance my plot. I know I need to work on the characters.
In my first ever book, about half way through Nanowrimo in 2008, I realised I had two characters the wrong way round. One should have been in place of the other and vice versa. So what did I do? I swapped them, in the very next scene, without explanation. If it had been sci-fi or fantasy, I might have been able to get away with it (Stephen Baxter does this in his book Time, although with slightly more explanation). Shame it was a spy thriller, really.
At my first attempt to edit Tarreck and his companions into something worth reading, I realised I had done the same. Before I had read anything on the subject of fiction writing, I knew it would be better to have these two characters swap places to up the ante for my protagonist and make his journey that much more difficult.
So I've re-read some of the book I wrote in Nanowrimo's coffee fuelled haze, and the further I've got through the messier it becomes. There's one point where (again) a character's location miraculously changes for no good reason. You'd have thought I'd have made a note, but I'll be damned if I can find it.
And now I find myself looking at two more characters and wanting to swap them round again, this time more to bring them out of their respective shells and fully blossom into the people I know they can be.
In the end I suppose I'm taking the necessary measures to improve my work like any other author, but I can constantly hear the advice of the pros in my head again - structure, outline, develop.
Maybe this November, I'll be better prepared.
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