Last night was good. Last night, a story was finished. A first draft of a story anyway. It's not ready for the public and it may never be. That's okay though. Writing "The Rin and Finnius Story" was a good learning experience and I will take those lessons and apply them to the next story. Maybe it can be for public consumption.
Rin and Finnius taught me that one of the biggest things that I need to work on is descriptions. All kinds of descriptions. People, places, things....Just everything. The world in general. During the writing, I found that I was good at putting my characters in a bland place. The characters could be bland alongside their surroundings too. Nobody likes bland. Yuck! As a result, the story suffered in both interest and length.
Let's address interest first. It's hard to be interested in someone or something if you don't know that much about them or it. Not that you need to know everything, a bit of mystery is always good. The thing is though, if readers can't form an image of a scene in their mind's eye, there is a good chance they will put your story down and move on. I can't blame them for that. Unless you're drawing pictures, your descriptions need to be dead on or the reader will lose interest. That's how it works for me. All things considered though, I think the descriptions were better near the end of the story. I'll see if that's really the case on the re-read in a few weeks.
And now the matter of length. "The Rin and Finnius Story" came in at just over 27,000 words. That's the word count that Word gives anyway. It would really be less than that when you consider that some of the words that are there shouldn't be. As I said before, this story was started with no real plan. Therefore, many things were written that had to be re-written, and since I'm not one to throw anything away, those words are still hanging out in the document. So, the cutting will begin soon.
After the cutting, the trimming of the fat so to speak, I've got a decision to make. I could go back in and beef up the descriptions. This would give me some valuable practice in a world that I'm already familiar with but needs to be fleshed out. It would also beef up the word count and possibly make the story better in the process. Option two is to keep cutting and shrink the scope of the story in hopes of pulling a short story from the wreckage. This may be the easier of the two routes, but I have no idea what I'll do at this point.
The only thing that's for sure is that it felt great to finish that draft. I'm going to plan a little more for the next story, but probably not as much as I should. I'll probably get all excited and start writing the wrong stuff again. Any planning is better than what I did this time though. So until next time, keep on write 'n stuff!
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