Even more fun is when you change the story. Trickier, not so slick and easy, since it's a manual process. For example, I'm early into my third novel in the Willow Brown series. Noah Phelps, her human lover, is the point of view narrator for all the novels (so far). In the third book (called A Houseful of Fairies, at the moment anyway) Noah was going to arrive at Willow's home in late September. Yesterday I had an epiphany and developed a major shift in the plot of the book. Like, totally different, but much better than the original idea. However, to make events work out, Noah has to arrive three months earlier in June.
Now, for Noah to show up sooner, some things have to change. In Illinois in late September, things are starting to get drab. Cottonwoods and the linden trees around Willow's cottage have lost their leaves already, but in June, the lindens are in full, fragrant bloom. So I had to rewrite those details. The days are longer in June, so when Noah goes for a walk at sunset, it's two hours later than in September. That means I have to find something for him to do for those two hours, or just remove the sunset.
Still worse is introducing new ideas that you wish you had thought of when you wrote the first book. Once you're published, you get locked into events already recounted. This is mitigated in my case by Willow Brown's irritating tendency to keep everything secret, so I was able to add some cool facts about fairies in the second book (An American Fairy), when her best friend Rowan blabbed away with Noah. Like fairies and mushrooms, for example. And by the way, I refuse to take the Hollywood approach and resurrect dead characters in later works. Sorry, with me, when you're dead, it's over.
So we writers can change history. At least, our little part of it.
1 comments:
Pleasant Post. This post helped me in my college assignment. Thnaks Alot
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