When it comes to the inclusion of explicit sex scenes in fantasy novels (particularly those not targeted towards romance readers), the decision tends to be divisive. Readers typically fall into two camps: those who find the sexual content gratuitous and/or unnecessary, and those who disagree.
I’ll admit that I used to be in the former camp. I didn’t hate or skim explicit sex scenes, but they often read awkwardly to me (sometimes to the point of being cringe-inducing). But even when they were well-written, I generally didn’t understand the author’s reasons for including them.
Case in point: the explicit sex scene early on in Fonda Lee’s Jade City, when Hilo visits Wen. We’re five chapters in (it’s titled “The Horn’s Kitten”) and this scene is our first introduction to Maik Wenruxian: she’s a stone-eye (someone without the ability to use jade magic) and the younger sister of Hilo’s two most trusted men.
When I first read this scene, I remember being extremely puzzled and put off. I couldn’t figure out why this interaction had to be shown on page—in that level of detail, with that kind of blunt, explicit language, and with that much of the word count devoted to it—instead of written as a fade-to-black or alluded to. There was nothing, I thought, that you couldn’t have gotten from a short sentence or two summarizing what happened. All of the important plot-relevant exposition you need takes places during the post-coital conversation the morning after.
Eventually, I got to the conclusion to the trilogy, Jade Legacy. It has another explicit sex scene that takes place between the same characters, many years later.
When I read that, I finally understood.
Hilo and Wen have a beautifully complex relationship that evolves and grows over the course of the trilogy which spans some thirty-plus years. Where they start (an up-and-coming gangster and his side piece, who has no place in gang business) and where they end up (as the mob boss and his most trusted advisor) is a study in contrasts. Who these characters believe themselves to be, who they are to each other, how they relate to each other and to the world—it’s a deep and nuanced exploration of all the ways in which love and duty complement and conflict with each other.
Looking back at the overall story, I don’t think those arcs and those later moments would have landed or been as emotionally powerful as they were without the explicit sex scenes. Those scenes ground the characters and their relationships in a raw and visceral way that other moments wouldn’t. When we see Hilo with Wen, whether it’s through his perspective or hers, we see him being vulnerable and open in a way that doesn’t come across in his other scenes. When we see Wen pursue the actions she does in secret, knowing why she makes those decisions, knowing how Hilo would feel about them, knowing how she feels about him, it adds stakes because we can guess at—and anticipate—the hurt and the fallout when he discovers it.
That was the moment when it clicked for me.
The sex scenes in The Green Bone Saga are not about the sex.
Which is a very long-winded way of getting to the point of this particular annotation: why did I write an explicit masturbation scene into Petition?
Because the scene is not about the sex.
But also because it’s the 2020s and hey, guess what? I’m sick of reading epic fantasy novels that feature subplots with female characters going on sexual/romantic awakening character arcs that culminate in her “becoming a woman” because some male character has “taught her” to do so and, somehow, no matter what her ambitions/wants are, she discovers that her life was “incomplete” prior to “falling in love” and suddenly finds ultimate meaning and purpose in life through being his sexual/romantic partner.
Just…no.
Girls and women do feel sexual desire and they don’t need a boy, or a man, or anyone for that matter, to satisfy that desire.
It is actually possible to feel sexual desire or have romantic inclinations towards someone and not want to take it any further because, you know, you’ve got priorities and being in a committed romantic relationship requires work and you don’t have the bandwidth for that.
And we don’t need to be ashamed of any of these things.
Of all the chapters in Petition, this is probably the one that I learned the most from even though it is one of the chapters that changed the least.
Because I write very similarly to how Naomi Novik writes—by starting with a character’s voice and inhabiting that character’s viewpoint—I generally have a very strong sense of whether a scene or sequence is or isn’t working. When I get the voice and the viewpoint right, the words just flow.
Such was the case with this chapter.
Chapter 21 concludes the mystery part of the cultist subplot and marks the turning point into the first climax of the book. (Petition is structurally weird because I consider there to be three climaxes altogether—but we’ll talk about that in later annotations.) There are five scenes in total:
Rahelu and her team in the alleyway
An Evocation of Xyuth and Dharyas’s last moments
The immediate aftermath of that discovery
An argument over dinner at the inn
Rahelu trying to sleep (added post beta read)
Aside from filling in 112 XXX placeholders and minor line edits (a net change of -266 words), what you read in the published version is basically the same as the original alpha draft. Scenes #1 through #4 were about as clean a draft as I typically write. The voice, the viewpoint, the character moments, the emotional beats, the overall arc—all of it was right. It worked.
Then the first piece of beta reader feedback came in.
I remember reading it and being absolutely devastated. For a few hours, I just sat there, thinking, “Oh god, they hate it,” over and over and over.
It didn’t work.
Why? Why didn’t it work?
I had no idea.
I kept looking at the feedback. While harsh, it had been honestly and thoughtfully written with a great deal of care behind it.
And yet.
When I had gone through every line of the text and considered every question they had raised, I couldn’t agree.
Fundamentally, I still felt like those scenes and that sequence were right. If they weren’t—well, I didn’t know how else to write them. But it took me three days of hard thinking to be able to articulate my reasons for writing these scenes and this sequence in this way.
Tragedy—and by extension, grief—is tricky to handle. Tragedy is an event but grief is a response; an individual one.
Considering the characters and their relationship to Dharyas:
Ghardon and Elaram: Dharyas was House Isca and they’re House Issolm. They may have studied together; they may have even interacted at social events. Most likely, this would not have been a frequent occurrence, given how much Dharyas likes to duck out on social events. They’re not colleagues or friends; they’re casual acquaintances.
Rahelu: She likes Dharyas. But, as Rahelu pointed out to Lhorne in Chapter 10, they’ve been friends for less than a day. After Petition Day, Rahelu never saw Dharyas again until she stumbled on her corpse in the Tattered Quill.
Lhorne. Not only are House Ideth and House Isca allied, he and Dharyas were close friends from childhood. Of all the characters present in this chapter, he is the one whose life would be the most impacted by her death.
For all of these characters, Dharyas’s death is personal.
They are graduates of the Resonance Guild. They were the ones who discovered her body at the scene of her murder.
But for Ghardon, Elaram, and Rahelu, it is not a personal tragedy.
They knew her but she was not their friend, their protégé, their daughter. Her death does not leave a gaping hole in their lives. Their reactions should, therefore, be proportionate to reflect that the shock, horror, and distress they feel is not, cannot, and therefore should not be treated as comparable—or even approachable—to what Lhorne or Tsenjhe or House Isca feel.
Ghardon, Elaram, and Rahelu can’t grieve for Dharyas, in the same way that Lhorne does. Portraying what they feel as grief doesn’t portray what Lhorne feels with the gravity that his feelings deserve.
For most of the characters, Xyuth’s death is confronting, but not personal. They’ve never met nor heard of him, prior to this. For Rahelu, there’s personal guilt from the possibility that her actions might have directly led to Xyuth’s murder and, by extension, Dharyas’s murder.
Though this is never explicitly stated, Rahelu is affected by these two deaths.
There is a marked change in the prose style in the aftermath scene, with long, run-on sentences and extensive parentheticals. This is not the analytical, structured thought process typical of Rahelu’s POV, nor do the sentences and paragraphs have the same cadence of her usual narration.
You have to read between the lines in the prose—how she remembers Xyuth had a consort and a daughter, how she reacts to the workers discussing how to arrange Dharyas’s hair, how later, at the inn, she eats everything in sight other than the pheasant dish—and connect these details together to deduce how she feels.
I could make this more overt but I’m not a fan of spelling out things that can be inferred.* The heavy reliance on subtext does make the prose more cognitively demanding to read but it’s an authorial choice I stand by.
There’s also the matter of how people in a high performance culture handle and express strong emotions in a high pressure, high stakes situation.
From the outset, the assignment is established as a stretch challenge even in the best of circumstances. The consequences of failure are life-threatening. None of the Petitioners can afford to go to pieces, so none of them do.
They have evil cultists to stop. They can break down afterwards.
One thing I’ve learned to do is to not action every piece of feedback** immediately. Reading is an individual experience. As feedback came in from the rest of my beta readers, it became clear that, for the vast majority, the emotional moments and the overall arc in the chapter did land. Nevertheless, I didn’t dismiss that one outlier in the beta reader feedback.
Neil Gaiman has famously said that people are generally right about how they feel but wrong about what the problem is and how to fix it. In my experience, this is true.
Originally, the chapter ends on a character moment I like quite a lot: my little dig at the trope of two guys fighting for/over a girl and ‘winning’ her.
There’s no such gendered practices in my setting and Rahelu has nothing to do with the conflict between Lhorne and Ghardon but people are people. Lhorne is romantically attracted to Rahelu and she to him. Ghardon knows this and has been goading them both. When Ghardon makes a bid to exploit this attraction and Lhorne falls for it, the implied sleeping arrangements are clear. Except Rahelu stymies them both by rejecting the game.
As fun and satisfying as this subversion of expectations might be, what it doesn’t do is close the emotional loop opened when the characters discover the murders. Throughout the chapter, there’s simply been escalating tensions but no release. Even though the personal conflict between Ghardon and Lhorne comes to a head with the duel, the outcome doesn’t resolve the question of how they’re going to stop the cultists or provide any emotional catharsis.
That’s why there needed to be one more scene.
When each of the characters are somewhat alone, the illusion of privacy allows them to be more honest. That’s when the prose can be more overt without coming across as either on-the-nose, overdone, or patronizing. And that brief moment of vulnerability is what provides the emotional catharsis we need.
*One of my favorite books is The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, whom I think is one of the most thoughtful and brilliant SFF writers of our generation. Baru is the kind of glorious, tightly written masterwork that I don’t even aspire to write some day; I simply like to read it repeatedly, admiring the beauty of its elegant construction, the way Dickinson’s deft understated prose uses subtext to express more emotion through restraint than most people do with an entire dictionary, and sing its praises to everybody I know. (back to reading)
**These days, I try not to read beta reader feedback as it comes in, because it’s better to look at it all at once so you can a sense of how the story is working across the board for the majority of readers. Makes it a lot easier not to freak out too! (back to reading)
When I started out writing Petition, I chose to write it in third person limited perspective. There were many reasons for that decision:
Most modern genre fiction is written in third person limited pasttense. Especially epic fantasy, when there’s lots of POVs. That’s not to say you can’t have multi-first person POVs (Naomi Novik’s multi-first person POV in Spinning Silver worked incredibly well) or a blend of first and third POVs (J.T. Greathouse does this in Pact and Pattern where The Hand of the Sun King is all first person POV and then The Garden of Empire sticks with first person for Wen Alder’s chapters and uses third person for the other POVs). But third person limited for all POVs used tends to be the default; I suspect because it’s easier to write and easier to read. And while Petition only had two POVs, I wanted the option to have more POVs in later books in the series.
First person is really, really hard to do well. When done well, it’s brilliant. (Examples that I’ve loved: Novik’s single POV first person in The Scholomance; K.J. Parker, however, might have written my favorite first person novel in Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City.) But when done poorly, it becomes really off-putting to read—I have DNF’d many a book for badly written first person POV.
There is no need for the story to be told in first person. Usually first person lends itself well to framing narratives—another technique that is brilliant when done well and irritating when done poorly—and I didn’t see this story needing one.
Second person is even more divisive. I’ve actually written a lot of second person prose (it’s the default when you’re writing case studies and immersive simulations) but it’s even harder to pull off in prose fiction than first person. Examples that I’ve loved: Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower, and Simon Jimenez’s The Spear Cuts Through Water. But all of those work because there are very specific plot and character reasons for choosing second person—and I didn’t have any of those reasons here.
Third person omniscient could have been fun. A lot of my favorite series actually flow between third person limited (a.k.a. a ‘close’ third) and third person omniscient. It’s really interesting to read The Empire Trilogy and Green Bone Saga closely to see how Feist/Wurst and Lee negotiate these shifts! I also love it when the omniscient narrator has a distinct voice as well—all of the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis do this, and the omniscient narrator often adopts first person too. But again, that adds extra layers and extra layers mean additional complexity and I did not want to bite off more than I could handle.
After deciding to write in a close third, the next choice was tense: past or present?
In my experience, past tense is more common but present tense lends a feeling of immediacy to the reading experience you don’t quite get with past tense. That said, I do tend to find that when I’m reading in present tense, I have to go through a bit of an adjustment period for the first couple of pages but once I’m into the story, I hardly notice the tense.
In the end, I cheated and used both.
For the most part, Petition (and its sequels) are written in third person limited past tense, with one big exception: any time the POV character is using or witnessing one of the time-based resonance skills, the Evocation, Seeking, or Augury is written in present tense.
This was a deliberate choice because I was after a very specific effect.
The core premise behind the magic is that emotions have resonances that echo through time. When you’re reaching back in the past with Evocation, or trying to glimpse the future with Augury, or trying to get a sense of how someone else is feeling in the present with Seeking, you’re actively experiencing those emotions in the moment of the working, regardless of when those emotions originate in time. The abrupt switch to the immediacy of present tense from past tense is the most effective technique to convey how this feels.
The other benefit is that the tense switch, in combination with indented, italicized text, is a very clear indication to the reader that ~Something Magical~ is happening. This is pretty useful as well because I often have POV shifts in Evocations, Seekings, and Auguries too!
…at least, that was my intent. So far, readers seem to be able to follow along without a problem, though it’ll be interesting to see what happens when they get to Supplicant, the sequel!
Many things have caught me unaware during the process of writing Petition but one wins the prize for the biggest surprise by a very large margin: the romantic subplot. That’s because I absolutely detest romance as a genre. (Sorry romance fans; it’s just not for me.)
I could—and have—gone on long rants about why: I hate the elevation of attaining a “happily-ever-after”/“happy-for-now” above all other ambitions, no matter how worthy; I hate how it insinuates that no one can be complete and fulfilled without a romantic partner and romantic love; I hate the myths it perpetuates about the nature of love, that love makes everything easy and effortless, that love conquers all; I hate how convoluted and artificial and contrived the majority of the conflicts to the romance are; I hate the angst (dear heaven, save me from the pages and pages and pages of angsting), the melodrama, the tropes, the eyerolling formulaic predictability of the plot, the—
You get my drift.
So why is there a romantic subplot in Petition, one that isn’t advertised in the blurb or cover?
I’ll tackle the easy one first: I don’t advertise or market the romantic subplot as a romance because it isn’t a romance.
Now the harder question: why put in a romantic subplot at all?
I didn’t intend to. Rahelu has no time for romantic inclinations, let alone dalliances. But while I didn’t want to write a romance, I didn’t want to go to the other extreme of pretending that romance doesn’t exist.
People do fall in love. People do yearn for love. People go to all sorts of extremes in the name of love. It is a human thing. And it turns out that when you put Rahelu and Lhorne in a situation where they get to spend time with each other, feelings develop.
Similar to the previous chapter, this chapter is full of dead ends for the main plot. Logic for tight plotting dictates that if nothing of interest has happened, I should summarize and skip over to the next plot beat that advances the main plot. In a shorter work, like a novella or a short story, I would’ve cut straight to the events of Chapter 20, but that felt like the wrong choice for a novel.
Why? Well, I think it’s because it risks turning the characters into plot delivery mechanisms. (Not that that was something I could articulate at the time.)
I’ve done some impossible jobs. Jobs that involve chaining myself to a desk in a windowless room crammed so full of people and documents that you can’t move without knocking over a stack of files or bumping someone else for 10, 12, 14 hours every single day because if you don’t, you won’t make deadline and heaven help you if you miss deadline because entire fortunes are waiting on you to meet deadline to decide whether they’ll rise or fall so you cannot, cannot miss deadline. Ever.
You would think that kind of job would make for a grim, stressful experience, full of hyper-focused Type-As too obsessed with climbing the corporate ladder to socialize—and there were huge stretches of time that fit that description to a tee. But I know, from personal experience, even when you are working on deadline in high pressure environments slogging through monotonous task after monotonous task in a pile that seems to replenish itself with more every time you look, people are still people. The work itself, when there are no exceptions to be found, recedes into the background and interpersonal dramas become the thing that passes the time.
You start noticing little quirks.
Idle curiosity provides a jumping off point for conversations which bloom into rapport (or disdain) and inside jokes and running gags that give rise to: hook-ups that turn into flings or serious romances; joy; camaraderie; silly pranks; absurdity that, if I told you exactly how it happened, you would tell me it sounds boring, unfunny, or ridiculous. (Which, robbed of context, would be true.)
It’s in these smaller moments that characters get to be more than what their role in the larger plot or their archetype suggests.
Sometimes, it really is just about the fish. There is no deeper purpose.
Other times, it’s not about the fish. There is a deeper subtext.
As they say: you had to be there.
Hence, the date.
Yes, they’re in the middle of investigating a series of gruesome murders.
Yes, they’re no closer to figuring out who the killer might be.
Yes, they’re running out of time.
They’ve also done everything that they possibly can for the moment; they need a break.
This date is the equivalent of hitting the bar for some after work drinks at 9 PM on a Friday night when you’ve spent all week fighting fires and you know you’re going to be back in the office again all day on Saturday from 7:30 AM because there’s no other way of keeping up with your workload and if you fall behind, your ass will get fired.
So: drinks.
Maybe something happens. Maybe nothing happens. Either way, you’re going so you can take your mind off all the things you’ve been worrying about for a few hours. You want that temporary distraction; you NEED it to stay sane.
But why then skip to the end of the date only to write the whole thing in flashback and mostly in Rahelu’s head?
If I were writing a romance according to proper romance beats, writing the event in chronological order, as Rahelu experienced it, would have been the conventional choice to make. But Petition is not a romance, nor is this a romance subplot. (It’s a romantic subplot, distinction being that while there is a romantic relationship, the focus is not on how they get together because that ‘how’ is not a given.) Petition is the story of the immigrant experience in a fantasy setting—and in that story, romance and romantic feelings and relationships are distractions; setbacks even.
Also, I’m really not a fan of how so often in fantasy and literature that’s not explicitly written to be romances that we still end up with so many story lines that conform to the conventional romance genre narrative template of: person meets potential love interest, person develops romantic feelings for potential love interest, insert some progression here, then BAM! They’re Together and now A Couple and That’s It.
No. Just no.
That’s such a narrow, idealized representation of relationships and romance and love and I find it incredible that it’s pervasive to the point of being the default in stories that aren’t marketed as romances.
Give me stories where relationships aren’t so neatly defined and simple. Give me “it’s complicated” dynamics like Gideon/Harrow and Harrow/Ianthe (and pretty much every pairing you can name) from The Locked Tomb. Give me characters who find romantic love and love deeply but do not allow that romantic love to subsume their entire identity and divert them from their purpose, like Lady Mara of the Acoma from The Empire Trilogy and Baru Cormorant/Tain Hu from The Masquerade.
We need more of them.
Chapter 18 is the kick-off for the murder investigations which make up the second half of Petition. Whenever I look back at this chapter and the outline I had for it now, it’s always very funny to me.
Not only am I someone who isn’t very into crime fiction, I’m also terrible with outlines.
But I knew when I decided to add in this murder mystery that I would have to have some semblance of an outline because I had to know, in advance, who the killer was, what their motive/s were, how the victims died, and what kind of clues Rahelu and her team of Petitioners would be able to find.
So I wrote down some basic questions like:
Who’s been killed so far?
Who is the killer targeting?
What is the murder weapon?
What is the killer’s motive?
Is the killer working alone?
How did they kill [extremely spoiler-rific character name]?
Who are they going to kill next?
I came up with 1-sentence answers to each of those questions and then I used Brandon Sanderson’s promise/progress/pay-off framework to plot the rest of the murder mystery.
Promise: there’s a killer going around the city knifing people with an odd weapon. If Rahelu and team can catch the killer, then they can stop the murders and also she can pay off her family’s debts.
Progress: ~921 words across 17 sub-bullet points that outline, in 1-2 sentences, what happens sequentially to solve the murders and confront the killer.
Pay-off: this one is obvious 😉
It ended up being more fun and easier than I expected mainly because:
Murder mysteries come with a built-in plot structure. Step 1: investigate the crime scene. Step 2: interview witnesses. From there, it becomes a series of pursuing clues and running into dead ends which dovetails very nicely with the “Yes, but…”/“No, and…” technique for building out the story.
I have the benefit of being in a writing group with Caitlin L. Strauss (author of the sci/urban fantasy detective procedural series, The Nocturnum Files) and Dan Harris (author of the humorous urban fantasy series, Unit 13, and some soon-to-be-published cozies). Seeing how they work behind-the-scenes to construct their stories has been a great help.
I also cheated by not writing a whodunit where the tension revolves around identifying and then figuring out which of the many possible suspects is the real killer. Instead, the plot revolves around tracking down the killer before someone else dies which, to me, is simpler.
One thing I did worry about—and that did come up in alpha reader and early beta reader feedback—was the sudden tone and plot switch from tournament to murder mystery. My solution for the tone issue was to add in the prologue and herald the plot switch with both Onneja’s Augury and repeated signals from Maketh that the stakes have changed. Late beta reader feedback indicated this worked for the most part though people were still confused as to how Rahelu suddenly had such excellent investigative skills so I added in a few lines of narration to clarify this.
Looking back at the various drafts, I think this was one of the most fun chapters to write.
While it’s not the first time we’ve got Rahelu interacting with her peers, it is the first time she’s doing so in relatively relaxed fashion. Strictly speaking, the first half of the chapter is full of dead ends and the latter half of the chapter—once we devolve from a debrief of their investigations to ribbing at Ghardon’s expense and a follow-up on the subject of Rahelu’s dinner plans—has no relation to the main plot at all.
The only thing maintaining a very light level of tension is the question of “who won the bet?” set up at the end of the first scene. I could have cut straight from the debrief to the next chapter but I think the story would have been poorer for it. Letting the serious conversation over lunch devolve into more lighthearted moments gives us emotional variety and the characters more dimensionality.
That, to me, is what makes a story both more fun to write and to read.
Chapter 17 is the shortest chapter in Petition. (Technically, the prologue, interlude, and epilogue are significantly shorter but they don’t really count.) The basic plot trope/beat—a makeover sequence—is pretty straightforward. And, as with most things that ended up in Petition, I didn’t set out to write it consciously.
I kind of hate the makeover trope on principle for many reasons:
It (often) places outsized emphasis on physical appearance and superficial trappings (like clothing, etc) over other attributes that I think are more important (like beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, etc). Like I genuinely haaaaaaaaate Sandy’s entire character arc in Grease because it can be summed up as: “girl meets boy; girl is compelled by boy’s entire social network to change everything about herself so she can be his Ideal Sex Object” which is just gross.
It feels lazy. (How to show a character changing? Let’s just literally alter their outward appearance and call it done!)
It’s been done to death. (Bet you can’t name a single fish-out-of-water story that doesn’t involve a makeover.)
So why did I put in a makeover scene if I can’t stand the trope?
At time, I couldn’t tell you why, other than “it feels right”. I felt that the story needed a change in tone, a change in pace, and also some more time developing the character relationships before we got back into the action. The House-born Petitioners dragging Rahelu off for clothes and resonance crystal shopping was just the most obvious idea that sprang to mind. But, in hindsight, I think there’s a few deeper reasons for including a makeover scene.
Makeovers are a staple in many stories
Perhaps it’s because we find them intrinsically fascinating because of the way they dramatize and juxtapose the before and after. Or perhaps it’s because all stories, arguably, can be boiled down to makeovers since—in the words of the great Ursula Le Guin—stories are about change. After all, if you go by the Save the Cat structure, you’re obligated to literally bookend your story with the before/after in your Opening Image and your Final Image beats.
What’s interesting to me is that most of the time when we hear “makeover”, we generally think “character makeover”—i.e. stories where the character needs to grow and transform to survive in the new environment. But there are other kinds of makeovers too—environmental makeovers—where the character stays the same but transforms their new environment. And sometimes, the transformation goes both ways with the character and the environment transforming each other.
It’s also interesting to consider where those scenes are placed in the narrative relative to the character’s arc and how they result in a different narrative effect.
Early in the narrative: the outward change is a physical manifestation of the new environment being thrust upon the character. The character’s arc is then about growing into that outward transformation.
Middle of the narrative: the outward change marks a turning point in the character’s arc where they stop actively resisting and start to pursue growth.
Late in the narrative: the outward change is an acknowledgement of the transformation that has already occurred. It’s the celebration, the victory lap, of a battle already won.
Chapter 17 happens shortly after the midpoint of Petition. It’s the first time Rahelu sets foot—literally—in a part of the House-born world she’s aspiring to join and she’s forced to make some compromises. At the end of the scene, she also, for the first time, decides to pursue something that’s purely for herself.
On top of that, we get to tie together several details (her family’s debts, their livelihood as fisherfolk, the loss of her Guild ring and tunic, Lhorne’s previous attempt to buy her lunch) into a character moment that develops the Rahelu/Lhorne relationship further while giving us a much needed change in tone and a breather from fast paced main plot.
Gender roles and clothing
A pet peeve of mine is gendered clothing. To me, clothing is both a physical manifestation of gender roles in society and an insidious method of imposing them. “Girls wear this; boys wear that. Good girls dress like this; bad girls dress like that.”
These days, I find it really difficult to pick up any fiction where the main conflict revolves around a woman or girl rebelling against traditional gender roles. These stories are important because that fight is still ongoing today…but I don’t want to read them anymore, especially not in my fantasy novels.
The power of fiction—all fiction, but speculative fiction in particular—is to pose the question, “what if?” and see where that leads. What would the world be like if this wasn’t true? How would our lives be different if that wasn’t a fundamental law of reality?
So why do so many fantastical settings carry over gendered clothing from our society as an unconscious default?
It’s not just that the gendered clothing is part of the default of “generic vaguely European medieval setting” that a Western audience automatically associates with “fantasy setting”.
It’s not just that so many fantastical settings incorporate real world gender roles and expectations as part of their default.
Why don’t these settings ever stop to consider the reason for gendered differences in real world clothing in the first place—and then consider whether those reasons even exist in that fantasy setting before importing real world fashions?
In writing Petition, I didn’t want to perpetuate any of these things. The reason Rahelu doesn’t wear skirts or dresses or gowns isn’t just because she comes from an impoverished family or because she’s attired for combat; Rahelu doesn’t wear them for the same reason that Nheras doesn’t wear them.
They don’t exist.
They don’t exist because I decided that in this world, gender equality is the default. Gender does not enter into the conversation of whether someone can do something; it’s simply not relevant to the decision. And if that’s the case, why would clothing differentiate between the genders?
The answer is, it wouldn’t.
So:
In Rahelu’s world, there’s everyday wear (tunic or shirt over trousers) and there’s formal wear (robes).
Clothing differs based on culture, wealth, societal position, and individual preference. It does not differ depending on gender or biological characteristics, other than for the obvious requirement of sizing. Hnuare’s shop, the Impeccable Mage, does not have a “men’s section” and a “women’s section”.
Ergo, if Elaram had been shopping for Ghardon instead of Rahelu, she would still be pulling out the same kind of clothes.
Epic fantasy has been my genre of choice ever since I stumbled across it at my local library. I can’t even remember which book or series it was exactly—perhaps The Belgariad by Eddings or Magician by Raymond E. Feist or it could’ve been Dragonlance by Weis and Hickman or maybe Pern by Anne McCaffrey. (Really, it could have been anything from the ‘80s and ‘90s.)
My parents could only take me to the library once a week and we could only borrow a maximum of ten books on one library card; that meant I had to pick books long enough to last me until the next library trip. That boiled down to “is this book thick enough that I need two hands to hold it comfortably?”
But since I devoured all the books so quickly, regardless of their size, I ended up with a very distorted sense of length as a reader.
That is how I ended up with an original outline that had called for ~25,000 words to cover the events of Petition to reach the end of Act I of the overall narrative. So in the very first attempt at writing Petition, I originally skipped straight from the events in Chapter 12 to Chapter 26.
(Yep. That’s a huge jump of some ~57,000 words or so. That version of the story is about ~38,600 words long.)
…Yeah. That didn’t work out. Clearly, I am incapable of writing an epic fantasy book that is only 75,000 words long. I was stuck; at the rate I’d been going, it would take me another ~80,000 words to write the next two acts I’d planned and I wasn’t confident I could pull off writing a book that long.
But ~38,600 words is waaaaaaaay too short to be a novel. (It’s a novelette? Novella? I never know where the line is drawn for those.)
That said, I was confident that the end of what would become Chapter 27 was the most emotionally powerful moment in the story yet. So I decided to cheat: I would add a subplot to the job hunt tournament to (hopefully) bulk up the word count by another ~33,000 words to end back up at my target of ~75,000 words.
I don’t exactly recall how I decided the subplot would be a murder mystery or that the murderers would be a bunch of cultists running around conducting ritual sacrifices. (It was probably because I was following Brandon Sanderson’s advice to build what you have before inventing new things; at that point, I had vaguely outlined what was involved in Act II of the overall narrative so the world building for the cult and the Endless Gate already existed.) Murder mysteries, though, require a lot more planning than tournaments so I took a week off writing new words to plot one in detail first.
Strictly speaking from a plot perspective, Chapter 16 marks a transition point to the second half of the book: the introduction of the murder mystery subplot signals a convergence between the main plot and the events foreshadowed in the Prologue and Interlude. Arguably I could have put the Interlude between Chapters 15 and 16 instead of having it before Chapter 15. However, since I was sticking to a linear timeline, the interlude chronologically happens before Chapter 15. I also like the switch up in tone where Chapter 15 sets up Rahelu’s expectation of the new status quo which is immediately upset by her seeing the assignment.
While my natural tendency is to write long scenes, it made sense to have a series of short arcs here, to tie up loose ends from the first half of the book and set the stage for the remainder of the novel with some “assemble the team!” scenes to introduce the main cast for this part of the story. Following the reality TV/tournament format, we’ve got the first elimination and a reset of the Petitioners’ board. Maketh’s speech serves two purposes: escalates the stakes of Petitioning again, and advance the House intrigue plot in the background.
Other noteworthy things:
Nheras Ilyn: the opening chapters of Petition set up the expectation that Nheras is going to be the primary antagonist for the book and we get plenty of that in the early tournament rounds. But with the way I set up the final round of Petitioning, that doesn’t really work unless I put Rahelu and Nheras in the same team and since the Petitioners are allowed to choose their own teams, that was never going to happen. I tried to mitigate that with a brief exchange as a reminder that the rivalry is still there but has faded into the background given the raised stakes.
The assignment board: Is this a deliberate nod to the adventurers’ quest board in ye olde standard sword & sorcery fantasy stories? Yes, yes it is. Did I intend to put that in from the very beginning? No, no I did not. How, then, did it end up in the book? I realized that fantasy iPads and computer screens would…actually work in my magic system and it would make sense for the society I’d created to use it. Also I’m a huge geek. And it was the easiest way of getting Rahelu’s arc to intersect with Azosh-ek’s while paying off on the promise of Onneja’s Augury in Chapter 13.
Elaram’s legal disclaimer: Probably my favorite character moment in this chapter though Elaram facing off against Cseryl and justifying giving Lhorne a mild concussion comes a close second. This chapter actually had the very first Elaram scenes I wrote since her introduction in Chapter 8 was something I added later (as part of beta read revisions) and her entire character grew out of that one line in Chapter 9. (“Don’t take it so personally! We’re just following the rules!”)
The trainee: we’ve seen Rahelu come pretty far in the book but I was conscious that because I was writing such a fast-paced book, I wanted another moment of character contrast. But I didn’t want to slow down the action just when we needed to be gearing up for more so I couldn’t put in another long reflective passage. (Not that Rahelu normally stops to do a whole lot of reflection anyway, because who’s got the time for that?) Hopefully having her notice just how different things were did the trick.
The shopping trip: Another thing that I didn’t deliberately set out to include, though once the thought occurred, it seemed like a good idea. I should note here that I originally thought Elaram would be the instigator but when it came down to the writing, it felt more natural coming from Ghardon.
Finally, one of my biggest worries about this book (other than, “is anyone actually going to read this and think it’s not terrible?”) was that readers might be put off by the rotating cast of characters. Even though Petition is basically a single POV book since Azosh-ek’s POVs are so few and far between Rahelu chapters, there’s no consistent cast of side characters. Every chapter or two introduces one or two new characters:
Ghardon in Chapter 16. (Ghardon, by the way, is the last of the notable characters to be introduced out of 27 total chapters, not counting the prologue/interlude/epilogue).
This is really an artifact of discovery writing. None of these characters—other than Rahelu, Onneja, and possibly Nheras—existed in my outline. They came into existence whenever I got to writing the end of one scene and started thinking about the kinds of conflict and who Rahelu might encounter next. Inevitably, it means having to go back through and scatter mentions of these characters in previous chapters during revisions, otherwise we end up with “pop-up” characters—characters who don’t feel like fully fleshed out individuals who exist in the world separate to the demands of the protagonist and the plot that pop up to fulfil a plot or character development in one chapter and then disappear, never to be seen of or hear from ever again.
Some days, when I look back over what I’ve written, I’m still not entirely convinced. Right now, I’m deep in the middle of doing alpha revisions on the third act of Supplicant, the sequel to Petition, and still grasping at understanding the motives of some of these characters. And there are certain ones whose motives still elude me entirely, even after trying to write scene after scene and chapter after chapter from their POV. But I hope that with more time and more words written, I’ll get better at creating characters who come across as real people.
I ought to have said back in the annotations for Chapter 13 that everything from Chapters 14 through to the end of Chapter 25 did not exist in the original outline, which called for the following:
Act I: Rahelu Petitions the Houses; becomes a Supplicant; is sent on assignment.
Act II: Rahelu completes the assignment. The assignment has huge consequences for the balance of power between the Houses.
Act III: House war.
Somehow I thought I was going to be able to do all that justice in…75,000 words.
…Yeah.
In that original version, the story skipped straight from the end of Rahelu’s audiences in Chapter 12 to the beginning of Chapter 26 and Act I ended with the end of Chapter 27. I got four (terrible) chapters into writing what was supposed to be Act II (and is now Book 2) before I became horribly stuck.
So I decided to cheat a little. I knew that final scene (what is now Chapter 27) was the best emotional scene I’d written and would make a strong ending. The logical thing to do here was to turn the book outline into a series outline and expand the ~38,000 words I had for what was supposed to be Act I into a full, 75,000-word novel. (Yeah, I still had delusions about being able to write a short novel.)
In my opinion, there’s only one good way to add length: add story. Again, I wanted something very tightly structured because I didn’t want to get too carried away and end up with something bloated.
Hence: the murder mystery that forms the second half of this book.
But I needed something to transition between the tournament arc—which is still ongoing since the Petitioners are competing with each other, though they’re doing so by completing assignments (quests) for the Houses—and the murder mystery subplot.
I also have a pet peeve about jobs and the recruitment process in general. I kind of hate it because the entire thing (as it exists in professional services) is a bait-and-switch for most.
The firms sell quite the dream to the bright-eyed grads fighting tooth and nail for a coveted position with them: a glamorous career where you’re using your hard-won skills and knowledge to present flashy, brilliant insights in pretty dataviz slide decks to the admiring applause of C-suite executives in the boardrooms where it happens.
The reality for most: 60+ hour work weeks wrangling data and documents that you don’t understand, triple checking figures and formulas with a calculator until your fingers and eyes bleed, going for coffee runs and other mundane tasks that make you wonder why you spent so long obtaining a very expensive university education to do things that don’t require you to use any of the knowledge and skills you’ve got.
Hence: the boring resonance crystal recharging assignment. Sorry, Rahelu. (Not sorry.) And sorry if you hated reading paragraphs upon paragraphs about it. (Sorriest to my beta readers, most of all, who had to read a very verbose version of it.)
Fortunately, this is fiction, not real life so things do happen.
Rahelu’s one-on-one time with Tsenjhe is one of my favorite character moments in the book. Too often in fantasy, women are set against each other. We expect the Nheras/Rahelu dynamic as a matter of default, where women are set up as rivals, often in the context of a man’s affections or approval or their suitability for these things and how well they embody femininity.
We rarely see all of the rich diversity of strong female relationships that exist in real life where women hold each other up. Even when we get female mentor/mentee relationships, it’s so often done in the context of “learning how to be a woman” or “learning how to deal with men” and I’m kind of sick of it.
Because just as men and boys can exist as self-actualized individuals and have relationships that do not revolve around the existence of women, women and girls do not need men to “complete” them as a person (please, let that Biblical notion die right there) and they can have fulfilling relationships that are not founded on any male-centric bases.
At the same time, romantic love and relationships is a pretty big part of life for most people. I don’t like the approach of just pretending it doesn’t exist either.
So it was important to me to show that Tsenjhe and Rahelu’s relationship is a strong one that is not centered around and would exist without Keshwar, even though he’s important to both of them. His name does come up twice in their conversations; both times, he is incidental to (and not the focus of) what they are discussing.
Because Tsenjhe and Rahelu’s identities do not revolve around how they fit into Keshwar’s life; they were fully realized people before Keshwar became part of their lives, will continue to be so long after he’s gone, and would have been so even if he never entered their lives.
When I wrote the published prologue, I did so very intentionally, knowing that I wanted it to form a little independent arc with the interlude and the epilogue. Yet I wanted to keep them as short as possible, so they wouldn’t “overstay their welcome” (as one of my beta readers put it) or steal focus from the main storyline of Rahelu joining the Houses.
But writing short things has always been a struggle for me. The initial draft of Azosh-ek’s prologue was 1,429 words long—and my alpha readers and I were agreed: it was far, far too long for a prologue.
Luckily one of them had an easy solution: end the prologue at “Time to be gone.”
That left me with a short fight scene about 1,057 words long. It was a scene that I liked quite a lot and had the right vibes. I added another 195 words to the beginning and hey, presto, I had an interlude!
If you’re reading along and you feel like you have no idea what’s going on in the prologue or the interlude, it’s totally okay. It’s meant to be “just vibes” at this point—hopefully intriguing ones!—that will be made clear later.
The storylines will eventually converge.
While I don’t have an exact outline of how everything will turn out, I know the general shape of it and, more importantly, the motivations of the characters and factions involved.
I do worry that by the time I get around to the writing, things will have shifted in my mind. (This happens a lot whenever I try to outline something in a reasonable level of detail; what’s actually written doesn’t really resemble much of what is outlined, but the overall concept doesn’t change.) Either way, I will do my very best to give you the most satisfactory ending I can.
I feel like a broken record saying this, over and over again, but in writing these annotations, it becomes really apparent just how mysterious my writing process is to myself: when I got to this point in the story, I had no idea how I was going to get Rahelu back into Petitioning after I’d decided that she had been eliminated.
But even though I detest repetitiousness in books, I feel like it’s important to be utterly clear that when I am writing and constructing a story, I never have a clue what I am doing.
Never.
I am, literally, just making it all up as I go.
I feel like this is important to reiterate because when I first began thinking “hey, I’d really like to write a novel someday” the biggest misconception I had was believing I had to know what I was doing in order to start writing.
No, no, and no!
Human beings are inherently wired to understand story. We literally can’t stop ourselves from seeing story in everything—attributing correlation and causation to random events and complex motivations to the acts of strangers, acquaintances, and close ones—because story is sense-making.
I didn’t need to memorize half a dozen story frameworks and watch fifty YouTube videos on “how to write a novel” or “how to plot” or “how to create characters”.
I just needed to sit down and start writing.
So that’s what I did.
I’m not trying to do anything fancy or groundbreaking with Petition—it’s written in third person limited perspective in accordance with current genre fiction conventions—which helps a lot.
To get writing, I just had to put myself in Rahelu’s shoes and work through a bunch of questions. Here’s an example of what I mean for the beginning of this chapter:
The starting point: Rahelu has failed in Petitioning and knows her mother is in danger of being murdered. Onneja has told her the only way to save her mother is to go back to the Guild and get into a House.
What must have gone wrong for her to fail in Petitioning? She mustn’t have convinced enough Houses to pass her to the next round.
How can she fix that? Find out how the Houses voted and convince the naysayers to change their minds.
Who would have those answers? The two Elders and the Atriarch who she had audiences with. But she can’t approach them so the next best person is Maketh Imos.
Where might Maketh Imos be? Most likely at the Guild.
The Guild is a big place. Where, exactly? She last saw him in the grand hall but he’s not there. He could be teaching, so the training yards or the classrooms are logical places to check—but he’s not. Maybe the admin staff at the Guild would know…
And that’s it.
That is literally my thought process when I’m writing in a character’s POV.
That’s how I write.
Which is why I have to write sequentially and why I struggle with outlining. It’s not so much the stereotypical “discovery writers can’t outline because once they’ve outlined, they’ve lost the thrill of discovering the story”, it’s because anything can look good to me in outline (bullet point) form but I can’t connect one bullet point to the next—can’t know if it makes sense to do so—until I start writing prose.
In a work of prose fiction, there is no story without the prose, because the prose is the story. Everything about the story—character, setting, tone, plot—is conveyed through the prose. One sentence has to flow to the next; each sentence has to build on those that came before. And when you do this over and over again, you get story.
Let me show you what I mean.
I began this chapter with this sentence:
Rahelu burst through the Guild gates.
Six words to establish POV (Rahelu), setting (the Guild gates, which we’re familiar with from earlier chapters), and tone (the desperate urgency of “burst” as opposed to the neutral “entered” or the lackadaisical “dawdled”; “through” implying overcoming a resistance as opposed to “in”).
This sentence leads to the next, and the next, and so on for the rest of the scene. Rahelu has arrived back at the Guild, she’s fired up because she’s moving at speed with forceful purpose (the implications of “burst” as a word choice again) and you know what her purpose is thanks to the close of the previous chapter and the current chapter title: she’s going to find some answers.
That leads seamlessly into the next set of lines—her introspection as she searches for those answers which shows us more of the Guild and the sociocultural norms of the setting—and the conclusion of that beat: Rahelu has gone full circle back to the grand hall and hasn’t been able to find anyone who can or is willing to help her.
What if I had started with this sentence?
Rahelu barged past the Guild gates.
Six words again. Same POV, same setting. But “barged past” implies unmerited self-assurance or a sense of entitlement or a blatant disregard for her surroundings. It signals some sort of direct confrontation ahead; perhaps with a comeuppance attached.
It could work, but I don’t think it would work as well. At least not from Rahelu’s POV, because in her mind, she’s motivated by desperation, not entitlement.
What if we changed the action and/or the setting?
Rahelu stole inside the Guild’s grand hall.
Seven words this time. We’ve cut straight to the Guild’s grand hall—with “stole” implying that she knows she shouldn’t be there—and skipped past all of Rahelu’s introspection and searching for answers.
Whether or not that beat is necessary is a different question. I could see people making an argument that it isn’t, considering her search is ultimately unsuccessful. But I think it is important to show that failure, otherwise we don’t feel just how lost and desperate she is. That way, when she’s sitting in the dark running her fingers over the resonance board—the tangible representation of what she’s failed to achieve—we understand what she’s thinking and feeling and why she decides fantasy hacking the matrix might be the thing to do.
After her previous failure, we get the thrill of watching her succeed—and then the terror of seeing her get caught immediately. And I don’t think Maketh hauling her off would hit quite the same if we hadn’t seen Rahelu spend all that time looking for him at the beginning.
Anyway. I hope that makes it clearer on what I mean when I say that prose is story, why I write the way I do, and why I recommend that if you want to write a story but you don’t know how to, you should just sit down with a blank page and start asking questions. Treat writing your story—whatever it may be—like it’s all just one, giant improvisatory exercise.
Ultimately, what you want to publish is a collection of written sentences that describe the situation, the emotional reaction to the stimuli, the physical action taken in response, and the consequence from the action, resulting in a new situation and new stimuli—over and over and over and over until you get to the end.
Because prose is story.
No prose? No story.
End of.
Addendum:
The very last scene in this chapter was added during my beta read revisions. Mostly because my beta readers got to the end of the interrogation chamber scene, went on to the next chapter, and were aghast they didn’t get a moment of Rahelu celebrating the win.
That feedback confused the hell out of me. Why would Rahelu celebrate? She failed…and was let back in based on some technicality she doesn’t even understand. She’s still got a long way to go before she’ll achieve her goal—and there’s no guarantee of that either.
Eventually, I realized that while the whole Petitioning process was clear in my mind, it wasn’t necessarily super clear in the text. That exposition also wasn’t something I felt like writing because every time I tried, my brain screamed “BORING BORING THIS IS SO BORING” at me.
I know this because I tried writing this last scene with Maketh as one where he lays out all of those rules to set up the next stage of Petitioning. And I just…couldn’t.
What I mean by that is “I couldn’t write a sentence that felt like it was authentic and consistent with how Maketh would act based on his characterization as already established in earlier chapters and in the context of the sociocultural norms of the Houses”.
It is the perfect example of how my outlining intent (“Maketh explains how the next part of Petitioning works”) falls apart the moment I have to write prose.
Maketh is pissed. He thinks Rahelu is a spy. He’s just been overruled by his superiors. He’s not going to explain anything nicely.
Nor do readers actually need Maketh to exposit any of the rules and regulations behind how Petitioning works at all; what they need is to have their expectations reset.
The solution that was staring me in the face: just have Rahelu be as ecstatic as readers expect she ought to be and then let Maketh bring her crashing back down to reality.
It’s one of the easiest revisions I had to do for this book…and one that took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out.
This chapter opens on a scene you probably expected: an announcement covering how everybody is doing in the tournament plotline; the fantasy novel version of the elimination episode on a reality TV show.
The main question we need to answer: does Rahelu get in and become a Petitioner or does she fail?
In the previous chapter, I tried hard to make both options plausible.
(Originally, this scene was placed at the end of Rahelu’s audiences so the second round of the tournament began and concluded within the same chapter. More on why I split the chapter later.)
But I’d realized early on, instinctively, that the right answer here is: Rahelu fails.
How did I know?
Because I didn’t want to write the scene where she succeeds.
Why not?
Because it involved me writing lots of words to describe Rahelu showing up to the grand hall to be told “congratulations, you’re a Petitioner now, here’s how the next stage of Petitioning works”.
And that is not a scene. That is an exposition dump. It is boring. Nobody wants to read that, including me. That means I don’t want to write it.
So how do you turn exposition into a scene? You find the source of tension.
I really like the try/fail cycle framework because it forces me to pin down conflict in a very concrete way that makes it easier to translate the conceptual idea of what the conflict is into prose. If I’m clear on what the conflict is, it’s easy for me to slip into my characters and figure out what they’re perceiving, how they react, and therefore how they respond. And then it’s just a matter of going from perception to reaction to response over and over again until the conflict is resolved.
The try/fail cycle also allows for wins along the way, even in the first half of the narrative. Characters can succeed at what they’re doing as long as there is some “Yes, but…” consequence to keep the tension going. The obvious way to do this would be to summarize “Rahelu, you’re in!” as quickly as possible so we can raise the stakes by cutting to the next stage of Petitioning and introducing the next conflict.
So why didn’t I do that?
Because I still didn’t want to write the scene where she succeeds. It didn’t feel like the right direction. It’s a tournament plot, but the archetype modern readers expect is “reality TV show elimination episode” which means they expect some sort of drawn out production about who gets in and who doesn’t. Which works when you’ve spent six one- or two-hour episodes a week getting to know all of the contestants on the TV show but doesn’t work in novel form when we’ve mostly been inside Rahelu’s head and we’ve only really met a handful of other applicants.
The narrative has spent so much time establishing Rahelu as an underdog; by this point, she’s beaten the odds twice already—both times by unconventional means. Once is a datapoint; twice could be coincidence. Three times is a pattern (*Note 1) and Rahelu’s success becomes predictable.
As a reader, I’m not a huge fan of predictability. I love twisty books, but I hate twists that exist for the sake of having twists. Twists need to feel surprising, yet inevitable (*Note 2), otherwise they feel arbitrary and unearned.
So I decided to pattern interrupt. Rahelu fails. And both the scene and the story became so much more interesting. (*Note 3)
It also meant that I could fix four of the big issues my alpha and beta readers had identified with one sequence:
I moved the scene with Onneja and her Augury from Chapter 1 to here, closer to the midpoint of the story, where it wouldn’t muddy up the story promises.
Originally, after Rahelu discovers she’s been eliminated, she decides to go looking for answers on her own. It was fine, plot-wise, but character-wise, beta readers felt it was inconsistent. Having her seriously consider the available alternatives now that Petitioning is no longer an option went a long way to showing how desperate she is.
Up until now, the evil cultist ritual murder in the prologue has been pretty disconnected with the main tournament plot. By putting Rahelu’s mother into Onneja’s Augury as a possible future victim, we get raised stakes, a convergence of plot promises, and a good segue into the murder mystery that forms the second half of book.
In the next chapter, Rahelu tries to find a way back into Petitioning. Alpha and beta readers across the board were extremely confused about where she got her idea from. Having a cryptic parting comment from Onneja cleared this up.
As a bonus, I was able to show the contrast in power/skill levels in what Augury looks like.
The Onneja scene is an example of a structural revision that significantly improves the narrative but is relatively easy to execute because it didn’t have any flow-on impacts. All I needed to do was move the scene from very early in the book (in the middle of Chapter 2) to about the midpoint of the book and expand it.
The funny thing is, even though the idea of the scene (Rahelu goes to meditate with Onneja) never changed, just about every line of prose in the scene did—it’s practically a rewrite from the ground up. (You can check out the full tracked changes from the alpha draft to final published version here.)
Finally, what makes this chapter work as a turning point is the pairing of the two scenes. Splitting off the elimination scene into the beginning of a new chapter instead of including it at the end of the previous one both figuratively and literally signals the beginning of a new arc. We answer the question raised in Chapter 1 with a resounding “no” and in exploring the fall out from that consequence, we have a new inciting incident that brings together the story promise made in the prologue. And by changing the end of the second scene to have Onneja leave (in response to the results of her Augury) instead of Rahelu (in response to time pressure to submit her Petition), we kick the plot back into high gear with raised stakes and a page turning hook.
*Note 1:
I’ve discussed how the rule of three can be very powerful in previous annotations but this is an example where I think following the rule of three detracts from the story. (back to text)
*Note 2:
This idea of “surprising, yet inevitable” comes from Joel Derfner, a fabulous songwriter and composer. I had the great fortunate of learning from him when he was teaching musical theatre at NYU. I’d written a song that contained a harmonic progression he’d really liked; it modulated from the key of F major (I) through C major (IV) to Ab major (not a related key at all).
I did not know what I was doing at the time; I went to Ab major because I was sitting at the piano, trying out all the different keys, and Ab major was the one that gave me the sound I needed for that emotional moment in the song. (back to text)
*Note 3:
Some of the themes explored in Petition is how the ideals of equality and meritocracy differ to reality and the idea of the immigrant dream.
Having Rahelu succeed here, as expected, would undermine exploration of those themes. It makes her character arc less complex. It reinforces the idea of “work hard and eventually you’ll succeed”. Rahelu becomes another example of a “success story” her society can parade around as an example of their ideals in action, when in reality things are rarely that easy.
I’ve been one of those lucky few whose path ran very smoothly. But there are many, many others who had more and greater obstacles they had to overcome before they found a way forward…and still others who never do. And thanks to the survivorship bias and our love of stories about triumphing over all adversity, we rarely hear their stories told. (back to text)
We’ve all heard the saying, ‘show, don’t tell’. It’s a piece of writing advice that’s been thrown around so much that it’s become a common catchphrase. No article or video about writing advice is complete without including “show, don’t tell”. Go to any book, filter for 1-star reviews, and there’s a high likelihood at least one of those reviews will contain some sort of critique along the lines of “there’s too much telling” or “all tell and no showing”. (Yes, I’m guilty of making this complaint too.)
I kind of hate this piece of writing advice because as a writer, it’s not very useful. Blindly following the rule of “show, don’t tell” results in pointless prose and bloated books.
Instead, I prefer to think of it as a choice you should consciously make for every event in the story:
Dramatize or summarize?
That is the question!
I went to an excellent writing workshop at NIDA once, which was about writing for the screen and stage. One of the most useful exercises I remember was a discussion of story versus plot. In the context of that discussion, ‘story’ meant ‘a bare, chronological succession of events’ and ‘plot’ meant ‘how the story is presented by the writer’. Or, more specifically, ‘events as ordered and connected in a drama; smaller than story; subject to authorial will’.
One exercise to explore this point was to picked somebody famous and think about how we would construct a plot around the story of their life. What should the plot be about? Their rise to fame? Their fall from grace? Their legacy?
How you answer that question changes the scope of your plot. Something like Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (musical, 2 hours and 30 minutes excluding intermission) requires different decisions on what to dramatize and what to narrate versus Breaking Bad (television series, 62 episodes, total run time of 61.3 hours, each episode sitting between 47-53 minutes without ads) versus Whiplash (feature film, 106 minutes) versus Nghi Vo’s When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (novella, 126 pages) versus Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (standalone novel, 272 pages, mostly first person epistolary) versus Janny Wurts’s The Curse of the Mistwraith (first in 11-book series novel, 233k words).
Which brings me back to Petition: so far, it’s Rahelu’s story about Petitioning the Houses. We open on Petition Day and we’ve followed her POV closely, event by event, as she goes through the Petitioning process.
At the end of Chapters 10 and 11, Rahelu has three spheres. The expectation is: three spheres, invitations from three Houses, therefore surely three scenes showing the three audiences.
So why did I end up skipping over House Isca to focus on Houses Issolm and Ideth instead?
Well, I had a problem: I didn’t know what I would write in a scene between Rahelu and Elder Nhirom (who, honestly, along with Elder Anathwan didn’t exist as a character.)
That’s not exactly news; I never know exactly what I’m going to write before I write it. I can outline all I want but the moment I open up a blank document in side-by-side view next to my painstaking outline of all the beats I’m supposed to hit, my discovery writing brain laughs and laughs and laughs and then just writes whatever the hell it wants to instead. (It wasn’t like I knew how the Issolm or Ideth audiences would turn out either.)
No, the problem was I did not know what the conflict would be in the Isca audience. And conflict—at least, when it comes to the style that is preferred in genre fiction today—conflict is the engine that drives the story.
No conflict? No scene.
No compelling conflict? Super lame scene.
The thing with House Isca is, everything you know up to this point you’ve learned based on Dharyas’s example—and you’ve probably surmised that Rahelu would not be well-suited to House Isca. Which means, you can also probably guess at how that audience is going to go. Unless I plan to subvert those expectations—or make the way the events unfold extremely entertaining—dramatizing (a.k.a. showing) the scene on page doesn’t do anything to serve the plot.
Don’t get me wrong; I could have written an Isca audience scene set in Nhirom’s workshop—but I would have had to introduce some other form of conflict because “Rahelu is clueless” is not a conflict; it’s a descriptor. 1500 words about Rahelu walking into Elder Nhirom’s workshop and having no clue what to do with her wire sphere is not interesting. You’d just be reading pages and pages of description about what Elder Nhirom’s workshop looks like (not that Rahelu would even have the vocabulary to describe what she’s seeing)…and for what purpose? It doesn’t contribute anything to the plot.
To turn that descriptor into conflict, I would need Rahelu to do something to the status quo. Maybe she disrespects the Elder and causes trouble for Tsenjhe. Maybe thugs break into his workshop during the audience and she saves his life. Maybe she decides to cheat and he catches her. Whatever it is, the characters need to end the scene in a different place to where they started otherwise there’s no advancement of plot/character/setting—just a lot of pointless words you could have skipped without missing anything.
Far better to summarize the Isca audience in ~250 words instead.
That frees up word count to compare and contrast House Issolm and House Ideth in how Elder Anathwan and Atriarch Mere Ideth’s approaches vary which builds on what you’ve already seen before.
I’m not entirely happy with those two scenes; I mean, let’s call them what they are: thinly-disguised world building exposition dumps about the Houses. But I hope that you found them somewhat organic and interesting to read without feeling like I’ve shoved a bunch of words I’ve copied and pasted straight from my world building wiki.
One of the decisions I’d made from the very beginning was that Petition was going to be single POV. I didn’t want to fall into the typical epic fantasy author trap of POV bloat that would land me in revision hell; I wanted to write a clean draft of a tightly-focused narrative.
(By the way, I’m sitting here writing this annotation after completing a first read through of the rough draft for Supplicant—which has…issues. Turns out that the choice of a single POV doesn’t necessarily help; it was the strict tournament plot structure and Rahelu’s singular goal that kept everything focused.)
As usual, I did not have a very detailed outline going into this chapter:
But what I had was a secret pet peeve.
Interviews are dumb
The main plot is fantasy job interviews and we’ve already done the job application and the group interview. The next stage in real life is usually individual interviews but let’s be real: an interview is a poor method of trying to figure out whether someone is going to be a good hire or not.
How is a super awkward 15-minute conversation in a sterile meeting room where you’re cherrypicking from a list of HR pre-approved questions (and trust me, you do not want to be going off-script as an interviewer; not only does that introduce even more bias into the process, it also makes everything that comes afterwards even harder) and the interviewee is doing their best imitation of a politician on campaign to spin their pre-rehearsed lines into a satisfactory answer going to tell you anything about how they will actually do on the job?
It relies on a whole bunch of shorthand approximations to infer ability and competence from a performance that has no relevance to what the actual job is.
Unless the job involves being interviewed, I guess.
Anyway, the process is stupid. The best way to figure out if someone can do something is…to get them to do the thing.
Hence the take home assignment.
(Confession: I had no idea what the spheres do when I wrote this scene. The nice thing about writing from Rahelu’s POV is that she has no idea either…and it doesn’t matter. For this book anyway.)
Yes, yes, it means you don’t control the environment in which those assignments are completed and therefore you can’t be assured that it’s the candidate doing the actual work instead of somebody else.
To which the Houses would say: who cares? The work got done. Also, the magic system literally allows us to check whether you’re lying about it being your work and/or check how you went about completing the assignment.
How Seeking works
My beta readers did wonder why it took so long to get an explanation with Seeking which ties in with this comment:
The other thing that annoyed me a bit concerned the world-building – the author introduced various terms describing powers/resonances by naming them without explaining their effect. But then, again, it’s easy to get the hang of it quickly, so maybe I’m just nitpicking a bit.
Reading Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series made me hypersensitive to exposition. It’s like entering the Matrix: once you’re aware of it, you can’t unsee it. Exposition is everywhere.
I did not want to get the criticism that Brandon Sanderson gets for his Szeth prologue in The Way of Kings (i.e. it reads like a video game tutorial for Windrunner powers).
There’s no reason for Rahelu to stop and think about how Seeking (or how any of the other resonance disciplines) work as she’s going about her daily business.
One trope I dislike in the fantasy genre is the whole “born with special powers” thing. That’s why I made magic is an intrinsic part of the world. Everybody in this world has resonance ability as a sixth sense and you can learn to do more with it if you choose to. Some people might be more naturally talented—just like how some people are born more athletic or artistic or whatever—but that’s all.
Rahelu stopping to explain how Projection works as she’s running up the hill to stop the Isonn baliff from roughing up her mother or how Seeking works as she’s trying to run away from Nheras and her cousins isn’t authentic to the character—it’d stick out as much as a character stopping to think about how they make their body walk. In these two instances, Rahelu is a graduated mage using her powers in magically straightforward situations: her concern isn’t how her powers work but whether she can protect her mother and whether she can escape with her Petition. Explaining the magic here would bog down the pacing and detract from the emotional intensity of the scene.
But when Rahelu struggles to complete her take home assignment, it does make sense for her to think about how resonance works. She’s attempting Augury, a discipline that she has no natural aptitude for, trying to follow Dharyas’s advice. It’s natural for her to think about how she does what she does as she’s doing it.
In short, I made a stylistic choice to not explain the magic system because it isn’t necessary. Between the names of the various resonance disciplines and the descriptive details on what happens when the characters use them, there’s enough on the page for a reader to infer how the magic works.
Hzin
My beta readers also had questions about this character and the overtness of the Augury. In particular, they felt it was tonally jarring and a departure from the rest of the story.
Why include sexual violence? Why include sexual exploitation? Why have sexual content at all? (Which we’ll talk more about in the annotations for Chapter 22.)
It’s a controversial decision. Many readers actively avoid books with sexual violence. Many more have taken the stance that there is already enough sexual violence both in fiction and in real life that we don’t need more of it. Especially when sexual violence in the fantasy genre (and let’s face it, in general) is often used gratuitously and is not sensitively depicted.
Readers (and authors) on the other side of the argument have offered many rebuttals. I won’t go into those here because they’re not really relevant to my decision.
In my experience, sexual violence isn’t really about the sexual aspect of the violence; it is about control. And in this setting—when the magic inherent in this world literally allows one person to override another person’s emotions, as Nheras demonstrates in Chapter 8—the uncomfortable question can’t be avoided, especially in a new adult/adult novel.
(Let’s temporarily shelve discussion of the other question of how Petition is sometimes categorized as YA for another time.)
To draw an arbitrary line felt disingenuous in a story that explores what people are willing to do for the sake of power.
Power, fundamentally, is about control.
There are some things about our world that I can easily imagine to be absent in a secondary world. Gender roles, for example, is one. I’ve spent my whole life proving that my gender doesn’t make me any less capable just because I’m not male. And I’ve been very fortunate to be born at a time and in a set of circumstances where I’ve never had reason to doubt this to be true.
The threat of sexual violence, however, is something that I—and every other person born female—live with. From the moment you’re old enough to be told “you’re a girl”, you’re also taught very specific things that aren’t taught to boys.
How to sit.
How to dress.
How to act.
All of these things are taught to young girls as preventative measures in an effort to protect them from the possibility of sexual violence. And you internalize these things so much that you can’t see the world except through those lens. And you modify your behavior accordingly.
Perhaps another author could imagine a world where sexual violence doesn’t even enter into the equation because it isn’t a possibility in their setting.
I, unfortunately, can’t.
Chapter 10 is interesting to analyze in terms of its construction. On the surface, it seems like a pretty boring scene. It’s just Rahelu, Lhorne, and Dharyas chilling out over lunch in a tavern with the rest of the Ideth applicants.
Not much plot happens. That’s deliberate. In Jim Butcher’s scene-and-sequel terms (though I don’t think he was the originator of this particular framework) this chapter functions as a sequel. The scene—being the challenges—was in Chapters 6 through 10.
(I did not, however, follow Butcher’s suggested structure. I don’t actively refer to any particular plotting framework when I’m writing new prose. While I like using the try/fail cycle to figure out what should happen next, it doesn’t drive how I write the scene.)
We begin with three open loops that drive the scene:
Who won the last challenge?
What is Rahelu going to do with Lhorne’s pendant?
Will Rahelu let Lhorne buy her lunch?
You can think of these questions as open Inquiry, Event, and Character threads respectively under Mary Robinette Kowal’s MICE quotient framework. Throughout the scene, we make progress towards answering each of those questions:
Lhorne carries the bulk of the conversation during the post-mortem, though Cseryl and Dharyas and Rahelu make their own contributions. We fill in the leftover gaps with some introspection.
Rahelu tries to return Lhorne’s pendant.
Lhorne tries to get Rahelu to eat, despite her initial refusal.
You could also analyze this scene in terms of conflict. Despite this being a slower scene, there’s actually quite a bit of conflict present between:
Cseryl and Lhorne (over his past decisions)
Lhorne and Rahelu (over his attempt to buy her lunch)
Lhorne and Rahelu again (over the loan of his pendant)
Rahelu and Dharyas (over Dharyas’s ambitions and vague plans)
Rahelu and herself (over whether she will give in to her hunger and eat the food in front of her)
Rahelu and herself again (over whether she should stay for lunch or rush back to Market Square to help her mother as she promised)
Alternatively, you could divvy up this chapter into several arcs:
Lunch which begins with Lhorne ordering food for everyone and ends when Rahelu scavenges the leftovers disposed of in the alleyway.
The post-mortem which begins with Cseryl taking Lhorne to task for trusting Elaram and ends when Cseryl and the other Ideth applicants leave.
The speculation around the audiences and the spheres which begins with Rahelu trying to return Lhorne’s pendant and ends when she agrees to borrow it for a little longer.
The discussion around which invitations to accept which begins with a question from Lhorne and ends with Rahelu’s rant at Dharyas.
But how do you figure out when to end a scene? Well, there’s several ways. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the frameworks that I’m familiar with:
In Save the Cat’s terms, it’s when an emotional change has happened.
In Steven Erikson’s terms, it’s once you ring the bell.
In Mary Robinette Kowal’s terms, it’s when you close off each MICE thread.
In Jim Butcher’s terms for a sequel, it’s when the character has made their choice.
All of this makes it sound like I’m a genius who plans out how all of these threads interweave together to build to a satisfactory ending of a scene, knowing the whole time where things are going before I write a single word.
The thing is, I don’t.
Sometimes I have vague ideas—“maybe there’ll be a moment where X happens”—but that’s it. I generally have no idea where a scene is going until I write it.
What I do is stick to the golden rules of improv: I start with a character in a situation, I utilize the “yes, and” rule to keep the scene going, and I build on what’s already been established.
This is the extent of my outline for this chapter. While I had some plot and exposition goals, I’m mostly heavily focused on how the characters are feeling:
I’m a discovery writer rather than an outliner or planner—character and setting work each other out as I go. I almost always start with a voice, in particular—what one specific character is doing or thinking or in the case of Uprooted and Spinning Silver, actually telling me in first person. It starts with a sentence and goes on from there, and what they’re seeing or feeling or in the middle of doing tells me something about the world, and that in turn builds the character, and so on. I think action is the best way to reveal character; what a character chooses to do in a given situation tells both me and the reader a lot about them, and the more I write, the more I get an inner sense of the character and what they WOULD do in a wider variety of situations, what it is they care about.
I don’t generally get writer’s block. What normally happens to me is I see too many different ways a story could go and I am paralyzed because I have to choose just one to write. (And then I write the novel length version and have my cake and eat it too!)
—Naomi Novik on how she plans characters and writes, via r/books
It is exactly how I write!
Like Novik, I write a line in a specific character’s voice in a specific POV and I go from there:
How will the other character/s respond?
How does the POV character interpret that response?
How will they/the other character/s respond to that response?
And so on and so forth until I get to the end of the scene. Which, for me, is when there is nothing else interesting that the character has to add. Usually this is when we’ve arrived at some sort of emotional resolution. For example:
In Chapter 2, it’s when Nheras has destroyed Rahelu’s Petition. The emotional arc here is from hopeful to gutted, but not defeated. The next emotional arc begins immediately afterwards, in Chapter 3, when she has to convince Xyuth to help her.
In Chapter 8, it’s when Rahelu and her teammates succeed in stealing the tokens. The emotional arc here is from dread to heady victory. I did not write out the chase sequence between the end of Chapter 8 and the beginning of Chapter 9 because there was no emotional arc there for Rahelu.
In this chapter, Rahelu digging through the trash for food scraps is an authentic character moment that serves as the obvious punchline for the end of the scene. Prolonging it further doesn’t do anything for her character or for the narrative.
Overall, the rough draft of this chapter came out pretty clean. (This is normal for me; XXX placeholders and some line level issues aside, I generally write very clean drafts.)
I only changed two things in revision:
I expanded the scene by giving Dharyas a character moment and deepening her pre-existing relationship with Lhorne. The entire exchange about her plans to open an independent mage shop did not exist in the first draft.
I also rearranged the flow of the scene by moving the speculation of what they were supposed to do with the spheres. Originally, it happened upfront but that raised the question of what Rahelu was doing hanging around instead of going to help her mother. Moving it to later in the chapter and linking it to her suspicions that House-born have insider knowledge smoothed out this inconsistency in her character.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how this chapter turned out!
Chapter 9 is the third-longest chapter in the entire book at around 6,700 words. (The longest chapter, if you’re curious, is Chapter 22 which has the action climax of the book. The second-longest is Chapter 21 which is the emotional build-up.)
I remember being incredibly nervous while writing the first draft because this is the first, big action sequence.
Unlike Fonda Lee, I am not a black belt. I do not have any combat experience. (A semester of dabbling in tae kwon do and archery and one trial class on kendo from a Groupon don’t count.) I enjoy a good action movie but they’re not really my thing. I generally prefer strategy and role-playing games over first-person shooters.
So I was very, very nervous about writing a free-for-all mock battle with a hundred characters running around. This is what I had in my outline:
(If you had trouble keeping track of all the banners and who had what, you’re not alone; I did too.)
Surprisingly, I more or less managed to stick to this outline.
Except for one, tiny thing.
For some reason, my discovery writing brain decided to write this:
She looked down and found Lhorne, lying on the sandstone just as she had left him, but he was looking straight back at her, with his clear green eyes.
I do not read romance. At all. Romance—as strictly defined by genre conventions—does not appeal to me. I hate how it magnifies the importance of one aspect of life disproportionately over everything else. I hate the K-drama-esque plots. And I detest the mandated “happily ever after” ending. Pitching me a book with “oh, it’s got a great romance in it” is the surest way to make it fall straight to the bottom of my TBR.
To be clear, I do not hate stories with romance. If a romance subplot shows up in a book I’m reading, I’ll enjoy it as much as I enjoy anything else in the book, provided it is well written. I just prefer the main storyline to be something else so it’s both extremely weird and hilarious that I ended up with a romantic subplot in my book.
Writers talk about their characters getting away from them all the time. You could argue that what happened here is an example of that. But from a writing craft perspective, I don’t believe that’s a useful way to think about it.
As the author, ultimately I’m the one in charge of the narrative. I create the characters in the narrative to serve the needs of narrative. To claim anything else is to disclaim my responsibility for the narrative.
I put that line in there because it “felt right”.
Why did it feel right?
There were many reasons—most of which I couldn’t have articulated as I was writing it.
First, because it’s an authentic thing for Lhorne to do in that moment and it’s an authentic reaction for Rahelu to have to him. It deepens both characters and their relationship.
Second, because it suits the emotional arc and the pacing of this scene, which has four mini-arcs: 1) Lhorne taking command and Rahelu acknowledging it; 2) Rahelu discovering the hidden Isonn banner and falling for the trap; 3) Rahelu, outnumbered against Isonn, and Lhorne ordering her rescue; and 4) Rahelu, taking revenge for Elaram’s betrayal. The first three have been heavy on dialogue and action with escalating stakes. This beat between Rahelu and Lhorne marks the turning point to the final part of the scene. Elaram’s just betrayed the team; we need a moment to breathe and process what happened.
Finally, because it hints at more conflict to come. Rahelu has undergone five years of grueling work and study. She was willing to risk her personal safety and push the boundaries of her moral code just to submit her Petition. What else might she be willing to sacrifice in order to join a House?
The main problem I had created for myself with the first challenge is that while scavenger hunts can be fun to do, they are not fun to read. I’d also set myself up to have twenty tokens in play—thank goodness I came to my senses during revisions and whittled them down to ten.
I had a couple of options:
Tell, don’t show: I could summarize part (or all) of the token search and skip to the next interesting part of the plot. Something like: “The first five tokens were easy to find” or “One span of non-stop running all over the city later secured their team all ten tokens”.
Introduce conflict: Ideally in the form of some obstacle/s that Rahelu, Lhorne, and Dharyas have to overcome in order to get the tokens. This could be a plot-based or character-based. In my opinion, plot-based conflict is the easiest to come up with ideas for but harder to make interesting—you have to be very inventive or clever to keep things from feeling repetitive—whereas character-based conflict is harder to get right but also more compelling.
Use the tokens as background detail to convey progress towards the overall goal: But that’s how we end up with 2,000 words that go like “They went to location A and found token 1, then they went to location B and found token 2…” and nobody wants to read that. I would need something else to take place as the focus otherwise it would just be boring description of Rahelu and her teammates wandering around the city.
In the end, I tried to do all of the above.
Conflict is the propulsion behind any plot; without it, all you have is an ordered sequence of events. So my number one priority is always to make sure there is some sort of conflict running through every scene. What’s awesome is when you can combine multiple conflicts.
Since I had already set up the final four tokens in one location, I knew that was going to be a single sub-objective and the big confrontation to end the narrative arc dealing with the first challenge begun in Chapter 6. This was relatively easy to make into a multi-layered conflict: we know Nheras and her cousins are applicants and Rahelu just spent three chapters clawing her way back into the Petitioning process after her defeat at Nheras’s hands; a more equal confrontation is in order. Both plot- and character-based conflicts converge when Rahelu tries to steal four tokens from right under Nheras’s nose—and succeeds. This is what makes the end of this sequence especially satisfying.
As I did not have six, distinct ideas with escalating stakes/tension, I simplified by grouping the early tokens together. Chapter 8 opens after a time skip on Rahelu and her team finding the last of those early tokens, then goes straight into a character-based conflict. This is what it looked like in the original draft (when they had just found sixteen out of the twenty tokens without any difficulty):
From there, we cut straight to the confrontation with Nheras and her team over the last four tokens. It worked…fine. At least, that’s how I interpreted this feedback from my beta readers:
But ‘fine’”‘ was not what I was going for. I didn’t want to see anything but green on that chart; I wanted ‘awesome’. I wasn’t sure that I could get there, but if I aim for ‘awesome’ and fall short, theoretically I should land somewhere between ‘good’ and ‘great’, right?
So I went back over the chapter and had a look at what I could do better. The first thing that struck me was the opening. There were 391 words of description that covered how everybody was dressed and an unnecessarily detailed blow-by-blow narration of them retrieving the hidden token—boring!—before we got this:
Buried in the middle of that section is a time skip—one that my beta readers rightly pointed out was a missed opportunity. Everything happens too easily for Rahelu and her team. We have no idea what the other teams are doing. This whole Petitioning business, which we’ve spent seven chapters hyping up to be a Big Deal, seems to be a walk in the park as far as this challenge goes.
One Clever Trick and the protagonist gets everything handed to her on a plate? I don’t think so! That’s certainly not consistent with the tone and story expectations I set up back in Chapter 1.
The first part of my solution was to cut down the opening and rework the first character-based conflict. I made it more internal to Rahelu and moved a bit of worldbuilding about the city here to foreshadow something that happens later in Chapter 12. It also builds on some of the introspection that happened earlier in the previous two chapters.
The second part was to follow the rule of three: I replaced the time skip by introducing a medium-stakes conflict in-between Rahelu’s angsting about her decision to listen to Lhorne and Dharyas and the higher-stakes action sequence with Nheras at the end of the arc.
The question was, what should this conflict be?
The answer in hindsight was pretty obvious: Elaram.
Elaram gets a decent amount of page time in the book but, for one reason or another, she doesn’t pull as much focus as the other characters later on. She’s also a very different character to the other House-born we’ve met: she doesn’t have the same ‘Mean Girls’ energy as Nheras, but she also doesn’t give off the same ‘Nice People’ vibes to Rahelu as Lhorne and Dharyas.
She’s also a lot of fun to write. I had every intention of keeping the expanded scene brief but, well—
(Three thousand, two hundred and fifty words later…)
Elaram is a lot of fun to write.
(This is how I set out writing a 75,000-word novel and end up with a 126,000-word draft.)
I did worry about whether Lhorne and Dharyas turning up right at the end feels a bit left field. In the end, I decided that it was okay: I’d set up the expectation that they were to meet up at the fishpond, Rahelu was wondering why they were delayed, and it was reasonable to explain their absence by having them go off to steal another token from Ghardon, Elaram’s brother. How, exactly, that all went down is just as much of a mystery to me as it is to Rahelu. I have no idea. I probably won’t know unless I write it and I don’t know if I ever will.
The last revision I made to this chapter was in the final scene. Again, it a scene that already worked because everybody is here to see Nheras get beat—Dharyas clubbing her on the head was actually the closing line in the chapter originally—but something felt lacking. I only realized quite late in the process that I had missed a pay-off.
In Chapter 7, Lhorne goes on and on about how important the order of operations is and how bad it would be if they messed it up. Then I did this:
All that obsessing over the order of operations to wind up with “Done” and a clean escape?
Nope. Not in my book!
“Oops” coupled with “We need to run” is, obviously, far better.
I honestly didn’t put a lot of thought into deciding what the challenges were: I simply wanted something that was action-heavy, that would showcase the magic system, and that would require teamwork.
“Scavenger hunt” fit, so I went with it.
By now, we’ve seen most of the magic system at play in basic ways already:
How resonance exists as a natural phenomenon in response to emotions
How resonance can be stored in crystal for later retrieval
All of the resonance disciplines: Seeking, Evocation, Projection, Obfuscation (once, briefly in passing), Augury, and Fortunement
Resonance wards
I’ve introduced all of these elements without explanation for two reasons.
First, I hate infodumps as a reader. After reading Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen (where exposition does not, as a rule, exist for anything), I became hyper-sensitized to noticing exposition when it occurs—and most of the time, it makes me feel patronized, like I couldn’t be trusted to make sense of the fictional world from context.
Second, and related to why I hate infodumps, is they tend to feel unnatural most of the time and therefore bog down pacing. There’s no reason why Rahelu would stop to think about how resonance works while she’s trying to submit her Petition: it’s a natural part of her world.
In this chapter though, I felt like a little exposition would be okay, since Rahelu, Lhorne, and Dharyas are explicitly discussing how the Houses expect them to solve the challenge. So we get a little explanation of Concordance, then a very long spiel on Obfuscation from Lhorne. Hopefully, it sits naturally in the narrative here.
Things I changed during revision
This was not one of the heavily-revised chapters, though there are still several things worth noting.
Revision #1: Simplifying the token scavenger hunt
I got a lot of feedback on my original draft that the rules around the challenges were pretty confusing. (Which was fair, considering that I was confused myself and making it up along as I went.)
One of the things I tried to do was simplify the token challenge. I changed the number of tokens from 20 to 10 once I realized that there was no reason to have so many. Which then generated this moment of panic from one of my alpha readers on their second pass through the manuscript:
“I just found this incredibly important note for you, so important that I wrote it on my phone at like 1am two nights ago and had no recollection of it”
(For whatever reason, I saw “tokrnd” and my mind went to Bitcoin and I was extremely confused.)
It took a while for us to work out that the concern was whether there would be a continuity issue now that the number of tokens no longer matched the number of Supplicants the Houses were taking.
Lesson learned: when making up arbitrary numbers, try not to overlap them!
Revision #2: Lhorne and Dharyas’s relationship
Originally, the scene went straight from Dharyas announcing herself, to Rahelu backing down, to Lhorne protesting.
Dharyas, as with Lhorne, was an unplanned character. Technically her first appearance is in Chapter 6 (she’s the waving hand). I put that in mainly because there’s always that one person in a group and had no intention of making that person part of the main cast.
One of the flaws in my first draft is while you have a good sense of how the different characters relate to Rahelu, you don’t really get a sense of how they relate to each other—which is an artifact of discovery writing them.
So in revisions, I went back to add a quick exchange between the two House-born. Strictly speaking, it’s not necessary to the plot, but it does give us a brief sense of what House-born life is like and—more importantly—it serves to establish Lhorne and Dharyas’s relationship.
A lot of this book was written by accident and this chapter is the perfect example of discovery writing in action. It has two scenes: an opening scene where Rahelu’s mother is helping her prepare for the challenges and a closing scene at the Guild when the challenges begin.
Rahelu and her mother
In the original draft, Chapter 5 didn’t exist, so this scene came straight right after Tsenjhe and Keshwar accept Rahelu’s Petition. It’s the exact same thing we saw in Chapter 1: Rahelu getting ready for the day, her father leaving early to the sea, and her mother berating her the whole time.
It’s a short, quiet character moment where not all that much happens. Strictly speaking, I probably could have cut it during revisions. I don’t know that you would notice its absence on a first read: we already have a strong sense of the dynamic between Rahelu and her parents from the previous chapters.
So why show it again?
Well, the narrative purpose of this scene is to serve as a contrast to the opening: while nothing has changed on one level, everything has changed on another. It’s the beginning of a shift in Rahelu’s relationship with her mother: their roles have been reversed but neither of them acknowledge it in the moment—in fact, they’re both doing their best to pretend otherwise. Without this moment, the final interaction between these two characters doesn’t quite land as well emotionally.
(It sounds like I was so deliberate in my intentions when you put it that way, but at the time of writing, I honestly didn’t give it much thought beyond “huh, we just got to the end of a pretty intense sequence so let’s take a breather, what would feel the most natural here?”)
The challenges begin
One of the upshots of writing a tournament arc is that the narrative structure is done for you. The tone and types of events vary depending on the story’s context—J.K. Rowling’s Goblet of Fire is a rousing inter-school sports competition; Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games is politically motivated oppression dressed up in the spectacle and dazzle of reality TV juxtaposed against the horror of death matches between children; Will Wight’s Uncrowned and Wintersteel is a showcase of military power by world factions through the vehicle of fantasy Olympics.
All I had to do was translate a real-world interview process into one that made sense in a high fantasy setting and I didn’t even have to change all that much: the challenges are basically full day group interviews.
Lhorne, though, was unexpected.
He wasn’t in the list of characters I had planned before I started writing. Not very surprising, considering that Keshwar hadn’t been in that list either. He simply grew out of that one line of description I wrote, about Rahelu having to peer around the head of the tall guy standing in front of her to look at what someone else was doing, and the realization that there was no way she could find a team on her own.
We’ve just spent several chapters inside Rahelu’s head, where she’s working alone to achieve her goals, building up a clear (but shallow) picture of what House-born are like in the process. To get more of the same wouldn’t be very interesting, so having Lhorne find all these little ways to dispel Rahelu’s preconceived notions was an easy way of doing that while keeping her off-balance.
There was one, significant change I made in revision. Originally, the chapter ended when she accepts that Keshwar had organized a team mate for her. In revision, I extended the scene further to do two things: first, to give you a better sense of Lhorne as a character, and second, to set up another tone promise for Rahelu’s arc.
Again, I don’t think you would miss this additional exchange on a first read. But I’m fairly certain that if I didn’t put it in, the ending would feel shakier.
One of the most unintuitive things I have discovered about myself as a writer is that I am, apparently, incapable of sticking to an outline.
I just can’t do it, despite my tendency to being structured and methodical in my approach to most things in life. I’ll make comprehensive lists of things that should happen in the plot and map out my turning points, then I’ll open up a blank document and my brain will go, “Awww, how adorable, but actually no, we’re writing about this instead.”
At the same time, it’s hard for me to start from absolutely nothing. I need some sort of framework, however loose, to be able to put down new prose. Otherwise, I end up sitting there, staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page, second-guessing every word that comes to mind.
So, what I’ve found works really well for me, is Brandon Sanderson’s approach:
I plan my worlds in great detail before I start writing, in most cases, and I plan my plots in moderate detail. I plot backward, I start with what I want to have happen for a plot cycle…and then I list a bunch of bullet points underneath.
…
My characters, I figure out who they are when the book starts, but I do not outline them in great detail…which means I have to have a flowing outline where, once I’ve started writing my way into the character I will then have to rebuild the outline periodically to match the person they’re becoming, which sometimes rips apart that outline quite a bit.
When I have the big, overarching pieces of my world and my characters’ motivations established, and a clear situation, it becomes much easier to write. Instead of sitting in front of my computer, wondering ‘how do I write a good book?’ (a question to which there is no right answer), I can ask myself a set of concrete questions:
What’s the situation?
How does my viewpoint character feel about that situation?
How do the other character/s in the scene feel about that situation?
Given their motivations, what would my viewpoint character do?
I find this method a lot easier than to work to because I can make myself empathize with them. But it does mean that when I write, I generally have to write scenes in sequential order, otherwise I have trouble with consistency in my characters.
It also means that I often end up outlining, then re-outlining as I go. I tend to over-outline too, which means I often severely underestimate how much plot and character development I can cover. (Exhibit A: this book, which was supposed to be 75,000 words long. Yeah.)
Chapter 5 is a weird chapter. It’s one of the few scenes in Petition that were written out of order during the first draft.
(There are other scenes that were written out of order by virtue of being scenes I inserted to address alpha and beta reader feedback, but those don’t really count in the same way.)
Originally, Chapters 3 and 4 were just one long chapter. The extent of my outline for it was this—the tracked changes show you what I adjusted after every writing session. This screenshot is from the point right after I had finished writing the first draft of the scene with Xyuth but before I got all the way through her Evocation up at Stormbane’s rest:
Hilariously, Keshwar isn’t in the outline at all at this stage. Pretty much everybody other than Rahelu, her parents, Onneja, and Tsenjhe didn’t really exist in the outline. They all just…kind of happened during the writing process.
Here’s the revised outline (again) after I started writing the scene inside the Guild courtyard. Note the ridiculous amount of question marks and how the details bear no resemblance to what I actually ended up writing:
And halfway through the scene, I figure out that I’ve made things way too complicated, so I start simplifying:
Scene 2.3 was still 2,695 words long by the time I was done with the significantly simplified version, and the chapter overall was at 7,226 words. I got to the end of the scene and felt like the next logical progression from a character and relationship perspective was a scene with Tsenjhe and her parents at home, which would have all of Rahelu’s worlds colliding.
Conceptually, it was a scene that should work.
At the same time, I did not actually want to write Keshwar and Tsenjhe paying a visit to Rahelu’s parents.
So I skipped it and went on to write the next chapter, which opens on the day of challenges.
Later, after I decided to restructure the book, I came back and wrote the scene with Keshwar and Tsenjhe escorting Rahelu home.
It’s a very introspection-heavy scene, which makes me worry. Introspection is hard to do well; writing too little of it means you often don’t get a sense of the POV character but writing too much can feel like pointless bloat.
Worse, it’s a scene where there is no obvious conflict and Rahelu has no overt purpose she’s pursuing. She’s pretty much just a passive observer, freaking out in her head the whole time.
So no surprises here: my alpha and beta readers were kind of confused as to why this scene was here at all. My gut feeling is that the change of pace is necessary. We’re at the end of a big, action-heavy opening arc; we need some sort of denouement to the resolution that yes, she’s in, her Petition has been accepted.
In the end, I left the scene in but tweaked a few lines right at the very end. I wanted to hint at a sense of a calm before the storm, that the stakes—high as Rahelu thought they already were—are being raised, and some hints at bigger things happening in the background that Rahelu isn’t aware of. (And won’t be in a position to be aware of for a long time.)
Does it work?
I think it does. The last line in the scene is a nice little callback to the tone promise in the prologue, and the additional details that Rahelu observes in her final interaction with Keshwar foreshadow something that happens at the midpoint of the book.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out; I think having this scene here makes for a much stronger transition than an abrupt cut from the end of Chapter 4 to the beginning of Chapter 6.
In contrast to the previous chapter, this next chapter was one of the easiest chapters to write. Very little changed from the original draft to the published version.
When I say very little changed, I don’t mean that in terms of actual count of words added, deleted, and moved around. I’m more referring to the significance of the revisions.
Since there were no significant revisions for this chapter, it is probably a good place to discuss how I do revisions generally, and what happens between typing “THE END” on the first draft to hitting “PUBLISH”. That’s because you can get a clearer picture of the extent of revisions that happen when there are no structural issues present.
(Structural issues, like those in Chapter 3, generally require extensive rewrites so I basically treat them as writing new prose.)
Scoping revisions
Typically, I divide revisions into two categories: major and minor revisions.
Anything that changes the overall shape of the story qualifies as a major revision. Adding, deleting, or moving scenes around are major revisions. Anything that impacts the overall tone, plot, and character promises of the story—like rewriting a scene from a different perspective, or from the same perspective but with a different emotional tone or arc—is also an example of a major revision. Big stuff that often, but not always, affects more than one scene or one chapter.
Minor revisions are similar in nature, but instead of working at the arc/chapter/scene level, I’m working with paragraphs, sentences, and individual words. That is, the scope of the revisions are contained within a single scene.
When I write new prose, I generally write every scene in a given storyline in sequence. I think (though I’m not 100% certain since I don’t feel qualified to attempt something as difficult as this) that if I were to utilize a narrative structure where there are flashback sequences, I would probably treat each timeline as a distinct storyline and write each of them in sequence. There’s an upfront time cost for me to get into the right headspace for the plot and the characters involved, so it’s easier for me to stick to one storyline at a time. Bouncing around different POVs in the same storyline doesn’t matter as much.
(This is what Brandon Sanderson does when he has to juggle complex multiple storylines; he writes each “throughline” from the beginning to the end and then interleaves the chapters together later. Here’s an example from The Lost Metal on how it works.)
But when I’m writing any given scene, even though I try to write the scene from beginning to end, I do jump around within the scene. I’ll write bits of sentences that I like the sound/feel of, but it won’t quite fit in with the natural flow of the prose that has gone before, so I’ll stick all of these orphaned phrases at the bottom of the document while I do my best to forge on, until I find the right place in the flow to slot them in.
Whatever doesn’t make it into the scene gets moved into the prose graveyard. RIP. If you’re curious, I ended up with 17,179 words in the prose graveyard by the time I was finished with major revisions on Petition, and an entire deleted prologue that was 5,856 words long.
Alpha and beta feedback and revisions
This is the most important stage of revisions for me. I don’t currently use a developmental editor for two reasons: first, because it wouldn’t be commercially viable at the moment; and secondly, because I’m fairly confident in my ability to spot structural issues in narratives, based on my writing experience.
Even so, I do not publish anything until it has gone through both alpha and beta readers. I rely on them heavily to gauge whether or not scenes are landing emotionally the way I intend them to, whether I have alignment between my promises and my pay-offs, the pacing of how my plot/characters progress, and whether things make sense from a continuity and world-building perspective.
My rule of thumb for whether or not I act on alpha/beta reader feedback goes something like this:
Only 1 reader pointed it out = I’ll action it if I agree with it
2-3 readers remark on the same thing (could be agreement or disagreement) = I need to investigate the issue and give it serious thought. 7 or 8 times out of 10 though, the feedback is either correct or points to a deeper issue and I’ll address it
More than 3 readers have an issue = this is a critical flaw I need to fix
Early readers were divided on the first scene. Some found Rahelu’s introspection slow; some enjoyed the change in pace and the description of the scenery; some had a problem with Rahelu’s run-in with her mother, citing their dislike of using miscommunication as a source of that conflict/tension.
Feedback on the second scene, however, was unanimous: the best chapter so far. Everybody liked the dynamic between Keshwar and Tsenjhe, and their interactions with Rahelu. Phew! No changes needed here.
The issue with pacing in the first scene was minor, and something that I knew could be addressed during line edits, which I’ll discuss below. The bigger issue to consider at this stage was whether or not I wanted to keep the nature of the conflict between Rahelu and her mother.
The Tiger/Asian Mom is a well-known and well-caricatured stereotype these days, to the point where it’s often just used for cheap humor. But that stereotype is rooted in truth, and that painful truth is, miscommunication and misunderstanding is a huge part of many immigrant parent/child relationships in my experience.
It is one of those things that sounds incredible silly to a third party observer when summarized, but when you live that experience, it is the kind of thing that tears you up from the inside and breaks you down, no matter how old you are.
For better or for worse, this kind of family dynamic is representative of the immigrant story I was trying to tell, so I felt it was important that Rahelu’s relationship with her mother reflected this consistently. Thus, I decided to leave the first scene as written.
When I write new prose, I do everything I can to focus on getting the plot and character arc down on the page right, and to avoid getting caught up on stuff that I know I’m going to fix later.
That means putting an ‘XXX’ placeholder in whenever any of the following things happen:
I can’t think of the right word or phrase I want to use in that specific part of the prose: this could be for the way it sounds, what it means, an how the word or phrase visually looks on the page, or even just that rhythmically an additional word or phrase that I can’t think of would be more pleasing to the ear, etc.
I haven’t named a character or location or an in-world term. There were a lot of ‘XXX’s at one point for all the swearing, when I was debating if I should use invented fantasy swears. Believe it or not, Keshwar was the reason that I decided to go with real world curse words—mainly because one of his lines in the next chapter just doesn’t sound right without them.
I need to quantify something (amount of time, timeline, distance, number of objects/people, money) and I haven’t decided exactly how many is feasible or reasonable in the scenario. Yes, I have a spreadsheet that calculates the loan amortization schedules for Rahelu’s family’s fishing sloop and her Guild debt, as well as list of every good or service that appears on the page and is paid for by a character, and a weekly budget listing income and expenses for Rahelu’s family.
I need a technical detail that I haven’t researched. If you’re curious, a lot of this had to do with fishing and the commercial sale of live seafood when refrigeration isn’t commonly available.
I need a sensory detail that isn’t plot critical. Honestly, a lot of this is clothes and food.
I need a specific resonance detail. Since colors and textures have significance here, I need to make sure I’m using them in a consistent way. This is my version of Sanderson’s revision pass to add spren into the Stormlight Archive books.
I’ve tried writing without placeholders before and it utterly destroys my efficiency. Here’s an accurate summary from Ursula Vernon:
All told, there were 1,443 ‘XXX’ placeholders that needed to be eliminated for Petition:
The graph above shows the number of ‘XXX’ placeholders by chapter, according to how chapters were split in the original draft. Hopefully, the original chapter titles give enough clues for you to be able to tell which of the final published chapters are which.
It took me a month to get rid of them all.
Prose
Here are all the different kinds of line level edits I do, to make the prose as polished as I can:
Continuity: these mainly related to the way the sequence with Xyuth in the Tattered Quill unfolded after structural revisions, as well as eliminating references to a recent interaction with Onneja. That was a scene that originally took place in between Rahelu and her mother arriving at the market and Rahelu lining up to hand in her Petition at the Guild. We’ll talk more about it when we get to Chapter 13.
Character details: Rahelu’s habitual resonance ward is something that comes up throughout the book that is thematically important to her and how the book ends. I’d made sure to mention it a few times throughout but I still did have some beta readers who were a little confused by it at the end, so I took the opportunity to reinforce it here.
Emotional distance: I have a natural tendency to write in a distant third personal limited perspective. I suspect it’s because I focus so much on pinning down specific, observable things when I draft scenes. When I’m across the viewpoint character’s frame of mind and in a flow state, it’s easier for me to write prose that’s more emotive/evocative, but this is rare. Generally, I have to work hard to reduce the distance in my perspectives.
Flow: this has to do with the narrative arc of the prose and the rhythm of how it reads:
I try to nest arcs within arcs within arcs, so that each word forms an arc in a sentence, sentences form an arc in a paragraph, paragraphs form an arc in a scene, and scenes form an arc in the chapter, and the chapters form an arc in the book.
Often, this involves me doing things like: moving sentences around until I’m happy with the order in which ideas are presented; sitting there changing my mind ten times about where I want to put line breaks; debating whether I want to have a long, half-page sentence with twenty clauses in it or whether it should be split up and if I split it up, how I want to punctuate it.
Sometimes, this involves me making a slight change at the end of the chapter by adding a hook. I have a natural tendency to end chapters right at the point of emotional impact. This generally works in later chapters because by then you’re invested enough in the characters and the story to keep reading to the end. Not so great in the early chapters because it doesn’t compel a page turn, thus allowing a clean exit point to stop reading.
Pacing: I tend to overwrite narration and description on my first drafts, since I need it to get into the viewpoint character’s head and to envision the space they are in. Most of the time when a scene drags, I can fix it by cutting back on the narration.
Word choice and phrasing: this is where I try to make a character’s voice more distinct. Examples include: deleting (excessive) filler words, replacing adverbs and adjectives with stronger verbs and more specific nouns, eliminating anachronistic or overused words or phrases, eliminating the repetitious use of words and phrases in close proximity, etc.
Extensive line edits tend to involve me addressing comments that past me left on the manuscript while I was writing the first draft. (Those mostly consist of things like: “this line sucks”, “UGH this is SUPER LAME”, “maybe this? or that? IDK”, and “fix this later”.) Sometimes, my alpha and beta readers will have left line level comments as well—this doesn’t happen often, because it’s not their focus, but they will mark things up if it sticks out to them. If so, this is when I look at those comments.
The rest of the line edits I tend to do in conjunction with copyedits—see below.
Copyedits
Once line edits are done, I export my manuscript from Google Docs and put it into Vellum for typesetting and book formatting. By this stage, any further changes that need to be made generally involves punctuation and are not extensive.
(There is an argument to be made that I should keep my manuscript in Google Docs until the very last moment. But doing that means a big time crunch when it comes to getting cover art finalized and the book uploaded for publication, which is why I stop working in Google Docs after line edits.)
Next, I do a complete read through of the manuscript and scope my line edits. This involves logging every single thing that bugs me at the sentence level in a spreadsheet, including anything that I’m unsure of:
Yep, that’s nearly 700 items scoped in for line edits across my manuscript. This is before running it through Hemingway and Grammarly.
This is the hardest part of the revision process for me. I can’t afford a copyeditor yet, so I am reliant on tools like Hemingway and Grammarly. I don’t always take all of the suggestions, but I do investigate all of the issues that are flagged.
A lot of the changes at this stage have to do with hyphens, commas, and US English. I made a conscious decision to write in US English even though I am Australian, simply because the majority of my readers are based in the US, and those who aren’t are used to reading in all forms of English.
Still, I had to draw the line on some things. Example: I don’t care if “leaped” is common than “leapt” in American English; I prefer the sound of “leapt” and it’s not wrong, so I’m keeping it.
Proofreading
This is the most tedious and agonizing stage. It involves me sitting with the printer files and reading the entire book backwards.
Yes, backwards.
As in, I start on the last word of the last page and read the whole thing backwards, word by word. It does my head in like nothing else.
But it absolutely works, because I pick up errors that have been there since the first draft and have gone unnoticed the whole time because everybody was autocorrecting it as they read it.
(Apparently two other effective tricks are to read it aloud and change the font to Comic Sans. I may try that for Book 2, since there was still an error that slipped through despite my best efforts. And if you spot something that might be an error, you can report it here.)
Upload
Once proofreading is done, I upload the print-ready PDF files and the EPUB files. It can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days for me to get a proof file.
Checking the proof file is usually a quick process of doing a page flip to make sure nothing is weirdly formatted or cut-off.
If I see any errors, I correct them in Vellum, re-upload then recheck the proofs.
Publish
Once I’m happy with the proofs, I approve the files for publication.
If there was one chapter that summed up my experience of writing Petition, it was this chapter, which has the dubious honor of being the most revised chapter in the entire book.
For the most part, I write very clean first drafts. That doesn’t mean they don’t require editing—they do!—but I generally have a good feel for whether or not something is ‘working’ after I write it. Thankfully, this is most of my scenes, most of the time, but every now and then, I will be stuck with a scene that I know sucks and that I have no idea how to fix.
Such was the case with Xyuth and the Tattered Quill.
The extent of my planning for the entire chapter was “Rahelu tries to salvage her Petition by sticking the torn pieces together” and since we’re in fantasy-land, the logical place for her to go was to a scrivener.
It is perfectly readable and narratively, it hits the same beats: Rahelu tries to convince Xyuth to help her; he refuses; she won’t take ‘no’ for an answer; he acquiesces; she leaves with writing supplies and a weird rock.
Yet it doesn’t quite work. It’s an odd, not entirely convincing interaction where the characters’ respective motivations aren’t clear—with two pages of egregious Magical Macguffin discussion in the mix to boot, which my beta readers absolutely hated.
I sympathized—I hated it too.
So why did I write two pages about a stupid magic rock in the first place?
Real answer: I got stuck while discovery writing the scene. Rahelu had no money and needed writing supplies; Xyuth is unsettled by her (for reasons that aren’t clear from the scene) but unwilling to help her. I needed something, anything, to break the stalemate so I just started having Xyuth throw out random things that he might plausibly have in his shop to get rid of Rahelu, and a mysterious rock turned out to be the most convenient thing that worked.
What does it do?
Well, that would be telling, because at the time that I wrote it into the story, I had absolutely no idea. I parked it to one side and kept writing the rest of the book.
(Of course, I’ve now worked out what it does…and you should find out in Book 2.)
It wasn’t until after I’d finished the whole draft—and was able to look back at the entire shape of the book—that I got a few inklings of possible directions for revisions.
The biggest structural issue with my first draft was that the two halves of the book felt like two different stories, hence the new prologue. By the time we’re at the Tattered Quill, we’re almost 8,000 words into the story—long enough that the details of the prologue have begun to fade. I needed something else to shake the narrative out of what otherwise feels like the ordinary (even if it’s a once-a-year, big deal kind of ordinary for Rahelu).
Having Xyuth engaged in dodgy dealings in his backroom with a strange mage solved a few of these problems, at the cost of clarity:
I’m pretty certain that most first-time readers will be super confused about what is going on with the Augury, though hopefully by this point in the book, I’ve delivered enough pay-offs that they’ll trust me to deliver on this one too and decide to keep reading.
I’m also reasonably certain that there aren’t enough context clues for a reader to figure out who the unknown mage is on a first read-through. I hope, though, that anybody doing a re-read will be able to guess at their identity.
The final, interesting thing I can share is that I didn’t intend Augury to play such a big part in this book.
One of the things I’ve learned from reading Brandon Sanderson is that it’s nice to keep the early books focused on exploring the core bits of the magic system and utilizing the basics in creative ways, so you can save some bigger reveals for later books. (This is done particularly well in the Mistborn books.)
I do worry that I might have introduced too much Augury, too early. It is important for future books so showing how it works in principle here is probably necessary.
I’ll just have to come up with some really cool stuff in later books! (No pressure…)
I always went into writing with the belief that I am an outliner. I’m the kind of person who lives their life according to a cascading collection of one-, three-, five-, and ten-year plans, where each group of short-term goals feeds into a carefully considered set of long-term goals.
But in actual fact, I’m not. I’ll sit there, plan an outline, then throw it out when it’s time to put my fingers to the keyboard.
(You’d think I’d’ve realized this earlier; if I compare every ten-year plan I ever made to how my life unfolded, very little of those plans survived their encounters with reality.)
In my penultimate year of high school, I’d taken an elective in drama. I don’t remember much of the curriculum, other than what my teacher taught us about the rules of good improvisation: when your improvisation partner makes an ‘offer’, accepting and building upon that offer generally results in a better storytelling outcome.
That mindset was invaluable to me as I was drafting this book. Most of Petition was discovery-written, with many of the characters and plot lines springing into being during the writing process, prompted by my use of the “try/fail” cycle.
Here are my original notes for this chapter:
Where’s the discussion of scene 1.2, you ask? We’ll talk about that when we get to the annotations for Chapter 13! But this is what the opening of the market scene looked like in the very first draft:
There was no competitive parental sniping between Rahelu’s mother and Hzin. Bzel didn’t exist. I hadn’t figured out any of the worldbuilding logistics around commercial selling of fresh seafood when refrigeration technology (or magic) isn’t commonly available—I hadn’t even named my fantasy fish. All of those things were added in during later revisions.
Even so, the opening chapters were some of the fastest chapters to write. My writing progress tracker says I was writing new prose at a rate of 926–1,154 words per hour. If only I could write that fast all the time!
Much of that draft remains in the published version. But one of artifacts of discovery writing is that I did not know what kind of story I was writing. I did not yet know the details of the main conflicts or who the main characters, other than Rahelu, were going to be—let alone what their motivations were.
As a result, the first half of this book needed heavy structural revision. Here’s the tracked changes comparison between the original draft and the published version. Surprisingly, the revisions turned out to be less about changing story beats and more about fleshing out characters and adding in extra details to foreshadow later events and/or to reinforce themes.
Bzel
The little moment with Bzel and Rahelu’s almost-Evocation was written after I wrote the original prologue, which I subsequently cut and replaced with a new prologue. That ruined the reversal of perspectives you get in the ending, so I kept this moment here to try and maintain some of that symmetry.
Lhorne and Cseryl cameo
This was my attempt to make the ending of the book less weird, structurally speaking. (I’ll discuss the structural weirdness in more detail when we get to the annotations for Chapters 24 and onwards.) I’m not entirely sure it works, but it does lay some groundwork for later chapters with not a whole lot of word count so I left it in.
Deepening Nheras’s character
Like the vast majority of the cast, Nheras wasn’t a planned character—she popped up when I needed to give Rahelu an obvious antagonist early on. But once she became part of the narrative, I didn’t want to make her a disposable antagonist.
In the first draft, Nheras reads like a typical bully/‘Mean Girls’ trope character. That’s deliberate—we’re in Rahelu’s POV after all—but it’s also a problem. There are moments where she borders on being an outright caricature. (Is there anything that screams ‘cartoon villain’ more that a character siccing their cronies onto the protagonist with some sort of variation on “get ’em, boys”?)
I hate reading one-note characters. They make it difficult for me to suspend my sense of disbelief in the first place and they rob scenes of emotional impact. Why should I care if the funny sidekick dies or if the antagonist is overcome if they’ve been nothing more than cardboard cut-outs?
(You can’t necessarily do this with every character. I didn’t have the page count to give Bhemol and Kiran more depth: Rahelu views them as Nheras’s thugs and that’s all you need to know about them. Narratively speaking, they’re there to underscore the main conflict in the scene, which is the Nheras/Rahelu rivalry. I could have added more moments to show that there’s more to Bhemol and Kiran than being bullies, but that’s not the story I was trying to tell.)
Powerful emotional moments have to be earned. For me, the most memorable scenes—the ones that evoke strong, raw emotional responses when I’m reading—are always rooted in conflicts between multi-dimensional characters.
Easy to point out where an author has gone wrong, but hard to do right. I tried to do a couple of things with the expanded Nheras moments in this chapter:
Create the sense of five years of history between Nheras and Rahelu.
Let the reader come to the conclusion that there’s another side to the story—one where Nheras and Rahelu’s roles are reversed.
Hint at Nheras’s motives and her relative standing amongst the other House-born.
I tried very hard to stay away from doing this via clumsy exposition. Not only because I hate it, but because we’re in Rahelu’s POV. She views all House-born as a monolithic entity and has neither the inclination nor the opportunity to learn anything more. Anything I wanted to convey, I needed to convey via implication and subtext.
Did it work? It’s a little heavier-handed than I would like, but I think so. At the very least, the published version is far better than the draft.
Tone and story promises
I had two big problems with my draft.
First (and most significant) was the two halves of my book read like totally different stories. It begins with essentially a tournament arc—Rahelu and her Petition—then halfway through, it takes a left turn into a murder mystery. (More on this in the annotation on the prologue and the annotation on Chapter 3.)
Second problem was the incompleteness of tone promises and consistency of tone throughout the opening chapters. I did not want somebody picking up this book, thinking it was YA fantasy, and then subsequently being horrified by the swearing, violence, and sexual content.
Expanding the exchange between the Ilyn applicants and Rahelu served a few purposes.
1. Spreading the dialogue between Nheras, Bhemol, and Kiran conveyed a better sense of their dynamic and established some distinctions in their respective characters.
2. In the beta read draft, Kiran already had an expanded role, though the scene was less sexually explicit:
I think Kiran’s implication here is clear but some of my beta readers were still caught off guard by the last scene in Chapter 11, which sets up two other scenes in Chapter 22. (The end of Chapter 11 is roughly 46,000 words into the book, which is far too late to be setting up tone and story promises. Those all need to be in place by the end of Chapter 2, which is about where the sample chapters on Amazon end.)
The other issue is, while we get Rahelu’s reaction, we don’t understand how she feels about the situation or the power dynamics in the world. The two additional paragraphs in the published version help bridge that gap.
3. Finally, there was an opportunity here to draw a clearer parallel between Tsenjhe and Rahelu, which is important for setting up some of Rahelu’s later choices.
Ending
In addition to splitting off the whole sequence from Market Square to Rahelu’s Petition being destroyed into its own chapter, I also changed the ending based on alpha reader feedback.
Originally, this sequence ended with Rahelu being devastated by the destruction of her Petition and Nheras stalking off. It’s a real downer of an ending and the version that I, and a few of my beta readers, personally prefer.
But when I stepped back to take a look at the overall structure of the book, I noticed my tendency to end chapters on emotional gut punches—perhaps because I conceive of them as self-contained arcs. Many of my early drafts lacked an explicit hook into the next chapter which was a recurring piece of feedback from my alpha readers. (The most common reaction was ‘what now?’ but not in a way that compelled them to go on to the next chapter.) This kind of chapter ending (mostly) works for the second half of the book as, by then, you’ve become invested in the characters.
But when we’re only at Chapter 2 and still in the sample chapters, it’s a big risk to take. I don’t have the marketing budget or the marketing department of a traditional publishing house behind me. Every reader I can convince to visit the product page for my book and click through to the sample is precious to me. If you’ve gotten to the end of Chapter 2, which has set up all of the story and tone promises, chances are you enjoyed my writing enough to read through to the end.
It might not be the creative choice I prefer, but adding the more obvious hook in here was probably the safer, more commercial decision.
Maybe someday, when I’ve built enough trust with readers, I can take some more risks creatively. But for now, I’m focusing on doing whatever I can to prevent the dreaded ‘DNF’.
This is the second-most-revised chapter in the entire book. There’s so much pressure to have a great, hooky first sentence. That pressure extends to the first paragraph, the first page, the first chapter…
(To be honest, the pressure’s there for the whole first book, and then every book that follows. Writing is hard.)
But there’s something about that first sentence that creates additional pressure. The blank page holds an endless promise: you could write the next The Lord of the Rings, the next A Song of Ice and Fire, the next Malazan Book of the Fallen, the next Stormlight Archive, the next Cradle—something that will be even better and more beloved than the works that have been immortalized in the literary canon.
And then you write your first word, and with that word, you’ve eliminated a billion possibilities. By the time you’ve written your first sentence, you realize that you’re a no-talent delusional hack who will never be able to craft anything a tenth as good as the latest trashy read you picked up from the bargain bin at a remainder store and you question your sanity for daring to have the audacity to think you might be worthy of trying.
Openings are hard to write. And they’re hard to get right. This is what my first draft looked like:
It follows roughly the same beats as the published version:
Rahelu agonizes over her Petition, trying to put the best spin on her answers without outright lying.
Her father reminds her to eat before he leaves for the sea.
She spills ink on her Petition.
Her mother scolds her for wasting food, for lacking manners, for being slow.
It ends the same way: her mother tells her to wash and hurry so they can arrive before Hzin.
I didn’t have much of my worldbuilding done before I started, so even though it was a short (for me) scene of 1,035 words, there were a lot of XXX placeholders. I started a list:
As an opening, it’s awful and boring:
There is no sense of who Rahelu is as a character.
There’s conflict between Rahelu and her mother but nothing happens!
There’s simultaneously too much exposition and not enough exposition.
Some magic is happening but it’s not very exciting.
The stakes are unclear and therefore uncompelling.
I made an effort to give Rahelu’s narration more individuality. (By then, I’d finished the first draft so that was easier do to.) I shoehorned in more exposition about the Houses, Rahelu’s interactions with the other trainees, her family’s immigrant journey, her prospects.
All that was fine. But what really saved the opening was the new sequence with House Isonn’s debt collectors. Without it, no matter how much Rahelu worries about money, the stakes feel abstract. But when money problems manifest directly on their doorstep with the threat of physical violence, the stakes become real and visceral.
That’s where the book starts to gain momentum. And it takes far too long to happen: not only did my beta readers have to slog through an almost 6,000-word-long prologue, they had to make it through more than 3,000 words of Rahelu reviewing her fantasy job application before House Isonn arrives on the scene.
Normal readers would have DNF’d somewhere around the first paragraph, I’m pretty sure. I needed to get them to the action as quickly as possible, to keep them hooked. For a while, I seriously considered moving all of Rahelu’s agonizing over her Petition to Chapter 2, so we could begin with the debt collection sequence. I even considered moving the whole scene to the Lowdocks proper.
I didn’t feel like that solution worked though. Something gets lost and the emotional impact is weakened, when you see that sequence play out without having seen Rahelu’s home environment, the contrast between the immigrant dream and the immigrant reality. It’s a little heavy-handed in the execution—I wish I had the skill as a writer to be more subtle about it—but showing that disjunction was important to me.
The only option left was to cut down the front-loaded exposition as much as possible. It made the apparent scope of the world much smaller, but that was a trade-off I was willing to make. (The post-beta-read version was 3,264 words long. Here’s the tracked changes version to the beta read version.)
The final word count for this chapter stands at around 2,700 words long. It is one of the shortest chapters in the book, apart from the prologue, interlude and epilogue.
Normally, I prefer much longer chapters. Around 5,000–6,000 words is where my chapters typically sit in a first draft, with the longest ones topping out at 10,000–12,000 words. Part of this is because I’m naturally verbose; the other reason is that I conceive of chapters as short stories with a self-contained arc. For me, the difference between a scene and a chapter is that while every scene should advance plot and character and develop the world, a scene does not necessarily contain an arc.
You’ll have noticed that Chapter 1, as published, does not have an arc. This was because Chapter 1 did not originally end here. It ended at the same end point of the published Chapter 2. The last scene of the published Chapter 13 was the middle of the arc, and it originally took place in the middle of the events that now comprise Chapter 2.
It was confusing for my alpha and beta readers and set up the wrong kinds of story and character promises. I moved the middle scene closer to the midpoint of the book, which we’ll discuss when we get to the Chapter 13 annotations.
That helped, but it still left me with pacing issues. Alpha and beta readers all agreed that the book takes a while to get going. I debated my chapter breaks for weeks, but ultimately caved and broke the story into shorter chapters to help with pacing.
I think it was the right thing to do.
I’m still not sure how I feel about short chapters. Hopefully, as I improve as a writer, I’ll develop more economy with my prose and get better at constructing multi-layered scenes, so I can pack more story into the same word count.
(I realized yesterday that The Traitor Baru Cormorant is only about 140,000 words long. It blew my mind. I’ve got a long way to go as a writer.)
Prologues have a bad rap. There are readers out there who have been so badly burned by bad prologues that they will not read any more books with prologues.
(I’m not one of them. As a rule, I like my epic fantasy with prologues.)
But this was my debut novel. I was going to have enough trouble finding willing readers; I needed to do everything I could to signal to those I could find that they wouldn’t run into any of the usual fantasy author hazards with my book: poor pacing; POVs bloat; and of course, bad use of prologues.
So, no prologues. No matter how much I liked them personally.
Unfortunately, I had two problems:
The first half of the book lacked sufficiently large stakes for epic fantasy. There is House intrigue happening, but Rahelu isn’t privy to it, so it isn’t apparent from her POVs—which form 99% of the book. Doh.
The murder mystery doesn’t kick in until more than halfway through the book, so it feels like a left turn out of nowhere.
I tried really hard to solve this without adding a non-Rahelu POV. But every solution I considered (Rahelu running into the murder/s or murderer, somehow; Rahelu hearing rumors about the murder/s; etc) felt horribly hamfisted and contrived.
In the end, I gave up and went with the obvious solution: I added a different POV and made it a prologue.
It’s a tried-and-true technique for fantasy authors because it works. Opening with Azosh-ek’s POV as a prologue lets me establish some story promises that I couldn’t set up with a Rahelu POV in Chapter 1:
Violence and gore level (I’m not writing grimdark, but there are going to be some gruesome scenes)
Move the emphasis on the murder mystery away from the whodunit aspect towards the why
That there will be multiple POVs. Not necessarily a whole heap of them, but it will not be a strictly single POV book.
I’m a huge fan of how Brandon Sanderson uses interludes in his works—they’re a nice little diversion between arcs in his books and offer a glimpse into other parts of his world that the main narrative doesn’t have the opportunity to visit yet.
It’s my hope that the Azosh-ek POVs (the prologue, the interlude, and the epilogue) offer you some variety from the Rahelu POVs, without diluting the focus of the story.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.
(Full disclosure: the Azosh-ek prologue was not the original prologue, though, which was a young Rahelu POV, set five years before the events of Chapter 1. If you’re interested in reading that, you can get access by signing up for my mailing list.)
Fantasy maps occupy a weird space for me as a reader. I don’t tend to do more than look at them briefly before I start reading, and I rarely go back to study them in detail afterwards, yet if an epic fantasy novel doesn’t have any maps, it somehow detracts from the reading experience for me.
Pretty silly.
It’s as if the presence of a map sends some sort of message about the author’s care factor in worldbuilding.
Totally unfair, since there are plenty of fantasy authors out there who have put in a great deal of effort into their worldbuilding but don’t have maps. Will Wight, famously, has a map for his own reference purposes and steadfastly refuses to put out any maps after his experience with doing one for The Traveler’s Gate trilogy.
I debated long and hard about whether I would put in a map. As a self-published author, I personally finance every dollar that goes into the publication of my books. Commissioning a map from a real cartographer was far out of my budget.
But I felt like I needed one, to make the right kind of tone promises for the series. My alpha readers had given me the feedback that my book didn’t feel like it had enough literary stakes for epic fantasy. Part of that came down to my choice of POV: since it was my debut novel, I didn’t want to fall into the common fantasy author trap of just throwing in random POVs for the sake of it. And in some ways, throwing in another POV felt like a cheat—like I couldn’t be bothered thinking up a better way to tell the story with the existing POVs I had.
As a result, Petition is a tight POV book. There are only two POVs—Rahelu’s and Azosh-ek’s (and his POV didn’t even exist in the first draft). Neither of those characters are in position to know much about the bigger picture politicking happening in the background…but that’s where the “epic” part of the story is.
Also, during the drafting process, my discover writing brain decided to make a map plot-critical. (More about that later.) That pretty much made my decision for me.
Since I couldn’t afford to hire a professional, I had no choice but to draw the maps myself.
Continent map
Of the two maps that I have, the continent map was the easier one to draw.
While Brandon Sanderson is my role model in many respects, I can’t really bring myself to detail my worlds to the level of detail that he does before writing. To be fair, this is important when you’re constructing a world like Roshar, where the natural phenomena cause the ecology and therefore everything else to be wildly different.
That wasn’t the case for me. By and large, my magic system doesn’t really have a big interaction effect with the environment. And since I’m not the best at geography, I used Azgaar’s Fantasy Map generator as a starting point. My process was not very sophisticated: it involved mashing F5 until I got something that I liked the look of.
From there, I traced over the coastline, the rivers, the lakes and made a note of the various biomes on the map. Once that was done, I followed some YouTube tutorials from the WASD and Caeora channels on how to add the rest of the details. My glaciers are not very convincing—they just kind of look like plateaus—but it was the best that I could do.
City map
This was the more difficult map to draw. Unlike the continent map, where it didn’t really matter where I drew the details, I had to get the city map details right, because they were plot-critical:
In theory, you should be able to figure out the plot twist from looking at the map. In theory. I’m not really sure how successful I was at foreshadowing it—you’ll have to let me know.
Here, too, I used a procedurally generated map to get started. This also involved mashing F5 on watabou’s fantasy city map generator until I got something I was happy with. (By the way, the Azgaar world map generator is integrated with watabou’s city map generator by default, which I think is pretty neat. But it doesn’t always come up with a suitable city layout, so I ended up generating a separate map in watabou instead.)
Tracing over this map took longer. I had to deviate from the base map a lot to work in key landmarks that couldn’t be procedurally generated but which existed in the narrative.
Maps and the writing process
Like I said, as a reader, I normally don’t pay too much attention to maps.
But as a writer, I need ’em. Can’t write without them. I get lost trying to figure out where something is in relation to something else. Sometimes, even trying to keep in mind how a room is laid out, where all the objects are located and how every character in the room is positioned relative to everybody else feels overwhelming.
The published maps were the very last thing I created, when I was taking a break between line edits and proofreading. For the most part, the base procedurally generated maps were sufficient for me to keep continuity straight…and of the two maps that I had, it was the city map that I referred to constantly. (And I will post that version, once we get to the chapter with the plot twist!)
Since I can’t afford to hire a full-time continuity editor like Brandon Sanderson, I needed to keep things as straight as possible during the drafting process so having those reference maps handy was vital. Sorting out timeline continuity issues was bad enough without having to add geographical continuity issues into the mix.
Most of the detailed descriptions of the city and various directions didn’t make it past the line edit stage. While I needed understand the exact route Rahelu took through the streets so I could make sure that it made sense, you didn’t need that detail since, as one beta reader pointed out, it slowed down the action.
I wish there was some way to shortcut this part of my process. Sadly, I don’t think there is, since I find it difficult to write something when I can’t visualize it. Turns out I’m the opposite kind of writer to how I am as a reader—when I read, I don’t spend much time visualizing the characters or the world. At least, not consciously.
Brains are weird.
I am a huge Brandon Sanderson fan. Not just as a reader, but as an author, too. His annotations and his unrivaled transparency taught me a lot about the craft of writing, and his YouTube lectures demystified the intimidating process of taking an idea for a story through to a published work.
There is nothing that I can do to thank Brandon Sanderson for his generosity, apart from one-click buying every single one of his books. (I don’t think that counts, because I’ve been doing that long before I published.)
What I can do, though, is pay it forward. This is the story of my journey to publishing my first novel. All the ‘behind-the-scenes’ stuff about my creative process: the highlights, the lowlights, and weird things. Anything that I think might be of interest to you, whether you’re approaching these annotations as a reader or as an author, including tracked changes through all the versions between rough draft and published text.
Consistent with Sanderson’s annotations, I’ve written these to be read as a companion text alongside the book. And if it’s your first time through, any spoilers for future chapters are clearly marked and hidden.
The story behind the story
Some authors begin by writing a story they’ve always wanted to tell. A story that’s occupied their brain space for years and years, that demands their attention until they have to sit down, put their hands to the keyboard or pen to paper until they’ve gotten the story out of their head and onto the page.
That wasn’t me.
I’ve always enjoyed stories and writing, but I never had a clue about what to write. Everything piece of fiction I ever wrote felt derivative—and it wasn’t even interesting-derivative.
I stopped writing fiction, started climbing the corporate career ladder, and wrote just about everything else. Critical essays. Speeches. Process manuals. Business reports. Proposals. Technical documentation. Textbooks. Case studies. Emails upon emails upon emails.
I tried writing a Broadway musical with a friend; we got as far as the middle of the second act.
I got married.
We had a baby.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Like many other organizations, my employer was caught out. We had no systems, no processes, no contingency plans in place. I spent the better part of a year working myself to death to make sure business could run as usual. It burned me out in a spectacular manner—complete with meetings with HR and “I quit!” emails.
I was fortunate to be in a place where I could take some time to recover my mental health. Part of that involved doing something purely for myself. NaNoWriMo2020 was coming around, so I decided to try writing fiction again and serialize the project via an online writing community.
(That novel was not this novel. It was a fix fic of a fantasy series where I loved the premise, but detested the author’s execution—I wasn’t brave enough to jump straight in by writing original fiction.)
It was a good feeling. And far more rewarding than my corporate job had ever been. It led me to join a writing group to get some critiques on my fix fic.
I learned a lot from their feedback. I learned that:
Whenever I have a new location, I go overboard with description that drags down pacing.
I have a penchant for using long, paragraph-length sentences with as many clauses as I can stuff into them.
I need to work harder on making sure conflict is present in every scene.
Getting tone, character, and plot promises consistent from the beginning is a real struggle for me.
But the best thing I learned was to have a little more confidence in my writing:
Your villains are good…the petty evil and the unrepentant evil bring me great joy to read about.
Ivy C. Kendall
I really want to see your original stuff. I’ve got a feeling it will be at least 10x better.
For NaNoWriMo2021, I decided I would finally take the plunge. Will Wight’s success proved there was an insatiable demand for more stories like his cultivation/progression fantasy crossover series, Cradle, and very few things in the market hitting the mark.
I set out to write a 75,000 word progression fantasy novel.
(Spoilers: I failed.)
I spent two weeks or so doing a deep analysis of what made Cradle so successful, building my magic system, brainstorming characters, and attempting an outline.
The night before NaNoWriMo2021 began, I realized I had no idea how to write a progression fantasy. My brain just wasn’t drawn to writing that kind of story. I kept the worldbuilding, but threw out the outline, and on 1 November 2021, I opened up a blank document and started writing.
I was determined not to repeat my NaNoWriMo2020 mistakes: editing as I write, and getting lost in research rabbit holes. ‘XXX’ placeholders proliferated everywhere. If I didn’t have a name for a character or location, or couldn’t think of the right word to describe something, or even complete sentences, I simply shoved a placeholder into the document and moved on.
I tried very hard to not revise as I went: my manuscript was full of comments on all the bits of writing that I thought was terrible.
There were lots of comments. Thousands of them.
But the process worked. I crossed 25,000 words in the first week, and 50,000 on day 16. Sometime during the third week, I had the sinking realization I would need at least 100,000 words to finish the story properly—and that the only way I could get unstuck from plotting hell was to split the book into a trilogy.
On the morning of Christmas Eve in 2021, I finished the rough draft of Petition. It clocked in at 109,188 words long.
(Just a tad longer than the 75,000-word novel I had planned.)
I spent January 2022 doing a worldbuilding pass to slay every ‘XXX’ in the manuscript, followed by a continuity pass, and a few revisions for alpha reader revisions.
The book went out to beta readers in February 2022. (It was 122,485 words long.) I took a short break to work on my blurb and finalize the cover design instead, while obsessing over the possibility that they would hate my book the whole time.
They didn’t hate it.
But they confirmed what my alpha readers had been telling me—that the two halves of the book read like they were two, totally different stories—and highlighted a few other major issues. (Since this post is getting rather long, I’ll get into the details in later annotations.)
I started structural revisions for beta reader feedback in March 2022. I didn’t finish until the end of April 2022. Some of these were major changes, so I sent it off for another beta read while I did line edits in May 2022. Those took about two weeks.
Proofing took another two weeks.
And on 31 May 2022, exactly 212 days (or seven months) after I started writing Petition, I logged into KDP and pressed the ‘Publish’ button.
It is not a perfect book. But it is, in the words of Will Wight, the ‘best six-month book’ that I know how to write.
