David S. McWilliams

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Good News, And Bad News

July 24, 2016 by davidsmcwilliams

Hey y’all,

Good news first: I’ve finished compiling my beta feedback for the new manuscript.

The bad news?  It needs a near-complete rewrite.  I’m hoping to have the next draft done by the end of 2016.  To make up for it in some small measure, I’d like to talk briefly about the biggest thing that’s broken in this manuscript.  Hopefully that will keep someone else from making the same mistakes that I have.

The external genre of this story is action, and every action story needs three things:

  1. A hero
  2. A villain
  3. A victim

To reduce an action story its most simplistic, the hero risks all to keep the villain from harming the victim.

I have a hero and a villain in the manuscript, but my only real victim figure is rescued at the end of act I.  Without a solid victim, the hero and the villain have no reason to come into conflict, and so the rest of the manuscript feels contrived and flat.  I’ve had to rely on coincidences and unrealistic grudges to keep the hero and the villain in conflict with one another.  Why should the hero bother fighting the villain when there’s nothing at stake?

There’s no easy fix here except rethinking the victim role entirely.

Thanks a ton to my beta readers for helping me figure out what’s going right (and wrong) with the new book!

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Filed Under: Analysis, Housekeeping, Writing

Comments

  1. robert bayless says

    July 25, 2016 at 12:47 am

    Hi David. I read the first chapter of your manuscript. I didn’t feel engaged, so I stopped. For me, the very first sentence of a book has to grab my attention. Yours did not. By the end of the first chapter, I did not know why I should continue reading, so I didn’t. A friend of mine is a published author, and he says he is not a writer, he is a re-writer. Good luck on your re-write. Don’t stop now.

    • davidsmcwilliams says

      July 25, 2016 at 1:06 am

      Good god, man, I blow up a spaceship in the first 500 words, what more do you want from me? Hahaha.

      No, but seriously, thank you for the feedback. Like I said, there are many issues with the manuscript, and the beginning is another one of them. The biggest lesson that I’m taking away from this is that mere pyrotechnics do not an intriguing opening make. There needs to be more meat.

      And don’t worry, I’m not planning on stopping.

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