Hello! Welcome to another Friday.
Today I will dive into the mess I fondly call a book. Let me walk you through it.
Fundamental structure failure
Yikes. If it sounds bad, it’s because it is.
So, as I told you before, Project Primrose is based on an RPG adventure1. I’ll give you a quick non-spoiler summary:
There are some intertwined characters on this novel. Spring2 is, at this point of the story, the protagonist. She is the one I was playing with, and therefore, the result of the actions I made during the game. Some other characters from other players are relevant as well, and the most important ones I will call Summer and Autumn. There’s also another character that was not a player but was equally relevant, whom I’ll call Winter.
A sneak peek into the characters
Although these names are placeholders and safety keepers, they were not chosen randomly. Well, a little bit, yes. But not completely.
I chose Spring to represent the character I was playing with, as this is the season that inspired the Project working title. This is also due to the things I drew inspiration from when I created her. Spring is in equal parts soft and ruthless. She is determined but still raw, young and in her primal aspect. She had not yet matured, she’s green. Moreover, Spring had a big connection to flowers and scents, which further defines her delicate aspect in contrast to her sharp personality. Both are crucial to her development and she is the beautiful mix of these elements.
Closer to her we have Summer, a fierce boiling character. I decided upon Summer for him because his personality is fire-like. Explosive, damaging, but also heartwarming and soothing when needed. He is sunny, and everything he touches lits with his energy. Summer could have been a main character of everything he wanted, and during the story he rises as a leader, and has his dawn at the end of the day. Summer and Spring are similar in energy but Summer burns harder.
Autumn is quite different — if Summer and Spring are rising stars, Autumn is a fading spark. He is reasonable at best, cautious at worse. He is not blazing as Summer, nor is warm as Spring, but also isn’t cold as Winter. Autumn is what we all need in life: a brief balance. As he evolves as a character during the novel, he fades and falls as the leaves during the season. His connection to both Spring and Summer is strong and troublesome, and Spring and Autumn bond over the end because for each it means a different thing: for him, it’s the death of his leaves. For her, is the blossoming of her flowers. Autumm is the tremble in our lips when we cry, the whisper of the wind on our ears, the last dance of the party.
Lastly, Winter is precisely what winter represents. He is cold, tricky, defiant, challenging. He’s the danger if you’re not careful. In a way, Winter precedes Spring because he is the imutable harshness, and she is the sudden change. The soften of the cold, the life that emerges from the frozen nature. They are close and similar, and simutaneously, they’re opposites. His cold has the power of harming her petals and frostbite burns harder than fire.
Defining focal point
Project Primrose started with me writing snippets of what happened during the sessions, from the point of view of the character I was playing, Spring. Spring was a narrow point of view, though, because she was not present in a lot of scenes that were happening to other characters, and she would only present facts tainted with her own opinions about it. I am not a fan of writing first person because of those problems, but her feelings and thoughts were precious to me as they revealed the way I was responding to the story. She and I were often the same, alas.
But precisely because her view was limited, there was only so much I could write about each session. That resulted in huge chunks of important plot advances of which I had no drafts about, because she had no saying in the matter. Therefore, when I decided to merge all the snippets into a draft for a novel, I had huge time skips that made no sense, new information to the reader that were being treated as obvious by the characters, and overall it was a confusing experience.
Naturally, the first solution I found to this problem was correcting the narrative perspective.
The narrative
The first part to that decision was speculating whether I would like this book be about my own character’s trajectory or something else. This would define whether her opinion was the most relevant for advancing the plot, or if she was just a pea in the pod. You see, changing who is telling the story is not that simple, for it affects how the story is told, and what is the most important and compelling part.
Imagine a book with three elements: a car, the person who owns the car, and the road. Choosing to write the story from the perspective of the owner will probably put the car in a secondary place, and the road will be a scenario. Alternatively, telling a story from the car’s perspective will change what are the factors that are relevant, as in the owner’s private life for example. On a different note, maybe having it being told from the perspective of the road will evidence the path the characters will go through to get to the end point. It’s about the journey and not the people involved.
This was the dilemma I was facing. I could decide upon telling the story from the owner of the car’s perspective — in this case, would be Spring — or changing it altogether and using the road as my main focus. In that case, no character point of view would be as important as the journey they are in. I decided the latter is what I wanted.
Changing narrators
Once I decided what is the centre of the book, I needed to make adjustments. Some parts of the snippets I had written were no longer relevant or appropriate to the story, as many events that had happened and I had deemed not important were now a matter of great importance to advancing the plot to where I wanted it going. For that, I had to highlight the parts that didn’t fit or were confusing in perspective.
I printed all the one hundred pages of draft I had and got to business. My narrator was settled — in order to tell a story about something rather than someone, I needed an Oniscient narrator. This part was important because I needed it being in third person, so it’s neutral of the characters’ opinions and views. But I still needed it to be able to show the reader the thoughts and feelings of the characters. This is important because the advancing of the plot depends on many decisions that were made over emotion.
So I had yet another problem, which was changing events that happened in order to fit the new narrative option…
But I’ll tell you more about that next week. See you for now!
For those who are unfamiliar, RPG stands for Role-playing game, it is a game of interpretation in which a Game Master tells a story and we, players, react to it as if we were the characters we created. Think of something like improv meets videogames. Our setting is a medieval one. Think Game of Thrones.
For the sake of protecting the content of my book for now, as I intend to publish it in the future, I will be using fake names and superficial plot description.
I love to see how you felt during these transitions, and makes me wonder which path would I take if I were you