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Chapter 25: Whipping Your Work into Shape
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character more interesting. Maybe she feels guilty because she made the
introduction and can now see that things are going wrong. Maybe she decides
she must try to sort the situation out because she’s responsible for it, instead
of passively listening. As a result she becomes a more complex and rounded
person, which adds an edge to all her conversations and introduces a new
complication into the story, adding narrative tension.
Try out this exercise in merging characters:
1. Pick two or three characters from your story who play small roles.
2. Now merge them into one. Pick characteristics from the different characters
and invent new ones. Now that the single character will play a
bigger role, try out some of the exercises in Chapters 3 (exploring childhood
and memory), 5 (embodying your characters) and 9 (complicating
the characters) to build up the different aspects of your new character.
Sometimes characters seriously get in the way of what you want to achieve.
You need to cut them out of your story entirely. If you watch films made of
stories from books, you find that minor characters are very often merged or
taken out altogether to create a smaller cast and keep the narrative line clear.
Occasionally, you find that you’ve made a minor character do too much in the
story – she keeps popping up all over the place in an unbelievable way. In this
case, split the character into two or more people.
Considering the order of scenes
When you’re writing, you often include information because you can’t remember
whether you said something earlier, or you find that the information is in
the wrong place for readers. This problem is comparatively easy to address
as you read through the latest draft; you often spot scenes or parts of scenes
that don’t add anything to the story or repeat information that readers heard
earlier. Or indeed you need to add information (see the later section ‘Adding
Necessary Details’).
Although you don’t want to have to make major changes to your work at this
stage, you may need to move individual scenes around, or parts of scenes, so
that the story makes more sense and reads better.
You need to handle the moving around of whole scenes carefully. The tips in
Chapter 24 concerning the second draft also apply here. If you move a scene
forwards, you may need to add in more details because the reader doesn’t
know about those yet. If you move a scene backwards, you may find you have
referred to something that hasn’t happened in your story yet, so you’ll need