redoing an outline | Stephanie Flint

I’d been sitting on the outline for Starless Night for a while… partially because I was cycling through projects, but also, because the prospect of the third Distant Horizon book was daunting.

I had a partial rough draft and an outline already written. (See the post from two weeks ago). But that outline was written before Isaac and I made major edits to Fractured Skies, thus changing the shape of where the story was headed.

Characters I thought were going to be dead were now still alive, and characters who lived in the role-play campaign ended up dead. (Still can’t quite believe Isaac convinced me to kill off that character… though it really did make sense for the story). And important plot points were revealed way earlier than we expected, rendering certain scenes in the third book no longer necessary.

Between all the character relationships and faction issues, I wasn’t sure where to start. Originally, I hoped to salvage bits and pieces of the previous draft to work into the revised version. But that seemed likely to cause more problems than help.

I stalled, hoping that writing Deceived would get me back in the swing of writing for the Distant Horizon universe. It did (and accidentally spawned a new series). I now wanted to return to Jenna’s story.

But it didn’t solve the wall I had been running into.

Then Isaac brought up the idea of cutting two very major plots that we had planned for the third book, and condensing the last two books back into one.

At first, I was resistant to the whole thing. I loved some of the scenes he was suggesting cutting, scenes we had discussed and honed a while back.

But…

There’s a saying that writers have to “kill their darlings.” (I kind of despise that saying, by the way). It doesn’t always hold true. But sometimes, eliminating a plot or a scene, or merging two characters, end up making for a better story. Or solves your problems.

I started thinking about Isaac’s suggestions. About eliminating those two major plot points and how it would affect the story.

And… um…

It worked a lot better.

Instead of taking a longer route to get to the climax by looking at various outside forces and their impact on Jenna’s brainseed, the focus is much more strongly related to the issues of Legion’s rise and the downfall of the Community.

Suddenly a lot of foreshadowing in Fractured Skies regarding artifacts, alchemist-enchanters, and the Elizabeth pendants had a direct tie back into the story. And the trimmed version made some of the future plans for this universe tie in more clearly, too.

I really liked the beginnings of the new outline and where it was going.

So I presented some of my new notes to Isaac and we began bouncing ideas off each other again, rather than coming to a stalemate about where the story should go.

So I decided to scrap the entirety of the previous rough draft. It exists as writing practice and helped to flesh out the world, but it was going to be simpler to start book three from scratch.

And that’s okay.

My hope was that my writing skills would have improved since I wrote the original draft, and starting from scratch helped reduce the amount of “revision smudge” likely to sneak in if we weren’t careful.

Best of all, we were having fun with the story again, and I looked forward to seeing how the pieces that we decided should stay would weave themselves together.

There were a couple directions we could take the end of Jenna’s arc, so we still had to figure out which one was the most satisfying and would make the most sense, especially since there was still going to be one more book after Starless Night, but it was now planned to be a four-book series instead of a five-book one.

((*Insert defeated laughter/crying here.* A note from present-day me who is in the process of revising this ancient newsletter email into a blog post… “Just four books? Sure… If I can figure out how to condense Changing Tides. Because last I checked, there’s still a whole missing middle section, and it’s already well over full-length. Either something major needs cut, or the book needs to be split into two.”))

So… what was one of those major changes?

Warning! Spoilers for Fractured Skies ahead!

It involved a return to the Community after Legion strikes.

The thing is, Legion isn’t entirely destructive. Though a lot of people end up with their life force drained to feed Legion’s ghostly legionnaires (hence sending teams to evacuate the area when it gets attacked), others choose to join Legion’s call to “control the chaos,” forming a cult that sees Legion as more efficient than the Community under Camaraderie rule.

Originally, we planned a sequence in St. Petersburg involving the destruction of the city, and after that, we didn’t see much of the cult (though Jenna did try to help with evacuations in other parts of the Community).

This time, we decided to explore what happens when Legion gets into the Community. The destruction-versus-life going on sort-of normally… while a certain prior (second-in-commands for Legion) becomes a primary antagonist, rather than being defeated early on. Which means this prior will return in Changing Tides.

And the HUGE thing we considered that we hadn’t before is how Jenna’s brain seed handles dealing with Legion.

After all, the brain seed’s creator also had a hand in creating Legion (well, the Legion Spore… since the creator didn’t expect it to be “killed”), and thus has a particular interest in Legion’s powers…

And acquiring said powers.

Normally, Jenna wants nothing to do with Legion. But while Jenna is under the brain seed’s influence, she has far more interest in Legion’s power than she should…

AND IT DOES NOT END WELL FOR THE RESCUE MISSION.

(Remember how I said there was a character who survived in the campaign but not in Starless Night?)

Anyway, that scene allowed us to really explore Legion’s influence, the Community, and the brain seed, in ways we had never expected…

And even ended up influencing the book cover design for Starless Night, as well.

I’m much happier with that book now. (And ugh… having a tooth pulled was literally easier than writing that particular book). But I really like how Starless Night wraps up. Redoing the outline was the right call.

So yeah. Ever completely scrapped an outline and tried again?

* * *

This series has undergone so many changes since we first started Jenna’s journey with a role-play game…