Idra Fallow

And that process means I end up rewriting stuff a lot, but since I've spent so much time doing all that I end up knowing it really well.

ok I'm gonna add to this because I'm thinking about it. I don't follow a formula with pre-planned story beats. I make an extremely rough outline that's more like a checklist of things I want to have happen, and then just kinda write stuff until it comes together? Does that make sense?

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This is a hyperfixation for me and I know every detail way too well. Which might be part of the editing problem. I see miniscule gaps that no one will ever care about

This is going to sound terrible, but I just keep track in my head.

I could make this thing 500k words and it wouldn't even be hard.

Just for that I'm adding two more.

Who is standing outside my window shouting "remove a subplot"? Show yourself, coward. I will never remove a subplot.

This is how you end up with a 300k word novel. :/

Me: It'll just be a quick rewrite. A few small changes. No biggie.

Also me: ooh but this part of the story didn't go deep enough. I should add a scene. Hm but then I need to change this part. OK I'll redo this chapter, and move this one here, and ooh also I'm going to combine these characters

I kinda think the one with the visions is gonna fill the role of "farm boy picks up a sword and goes on an adventure." Not knocking that archetype at all. We love a young hero leaving their small village to discover a fantastic world and learn things about themself.

So far the women in this book all seem like fully realized, competent people with believable flaws and personalities that are distinct from one another, which is a nice thing to see in this genre.

Ok I'm not necessarily excited to read a medieval warfare type fantasy, but the characters in this are already great. It's the first in the Age of Madness trilogy. We've got an old woman (maybe a witch?) and a young woman who has vision-inducing seizures, and their banter is excellent.

Ditched Way of Kings because I got sucked into a Joe Abercrombie novel. This feels more my speed

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And then there's seven named cultures/peoples/places, and another made-up fantasy words for objects/species/concepts/etc. Stormlight and Shardblades are mentioned frequently without explaining what they are.

Which is fine. I'm following this story perfectly well.

After reading the first few pages of The Way of Kings, I am no longer taking criticism about the number of named characters in my novel. Sanderson has like fourteen character names in the first ten pages or so, some of which are the same characters with slightly different names.

Which is hard because the protagonist lives in a village of about 300 people. And everyone else also lives in small groups like that. It's rare for any of them to meet someone and not know their name, so I have to be creative to make the scenes feel busy enough without every person's name coming up.

Then again, the people who gave me this feedback said they're not really big fantasy readers. I think I had 100-odd named characters in my first draft, and now I have 53. I tried to avoid the thing you see in, for example, ASOIAF, where people who are essentially just set extras have names.

It was more a philosophical question tbh lol. But also I've received feedback that there are too many characters. I've winnowed it down as much as I can, I think, unless I start killing some darlings. Which I'd rather not.

Someone with an MFA help me, my novel is dying

Does it count as an arc if the character doesn't actually change, but the perception the protagonist has of them does? Like, if she starts out thinking someone is on her side and friendly, and then it turns out they were plotting against her all along, is that an arc for them, or just the protag?

There are even some characters who have zero lines of dialog that the protagonist understands. Before I wrote the conlang, all of them were like "He grumbled something under his breath." Sometimes she gets translations. Sometimes not. One hardly talks at all. But all of them have some type of arc.

Does dying count as an arc? I mean, it's a big change, yeah?

I guess not every secondary needs an arc?

And there are some tertiary characters who definitely have arcs. Partly because they become more important in book 2.

I'm thinking about this because I'm trying to decide if I have too many characters still. I've been cutting out some of the really minor ones who don't really do anything, and giving whatever small role they play to other characters. So I'm sorting "secondary" and "tertiary"

It occurs to me that some of the characters I personally think of as secondary are maybe actually tertiary.

Like I think of protag's gf as secondary. She's a major motivator for protag, she is integral to the plot (albeit without protag's knowledge). But does she have an arc? Does she change?

I had fun doing it, though.

Ain't that always the way. All the academic work I ever did was unpaid, or in the case of field schools and research for my undergraduate thesis, I paid for the privilege of doing it.

This sounds both painful and delightful.