Old Habits

I've been writing since I was 12 or 13, and something that every new writer can sympathise with and understand is the wish to create something truly epic. You know, that five-book saga with a cast number that puts A Song of Ice and Fire to shame, a compelling narrative that keeps readers hooked until the last page. Little do they think of the massive technical difficulties and sheer labour such a project entails. I mean, I know I wrote what turned out to be a duology in eight months, but it took another year and a half to polish it into a readable form. And even then I had grand ideas of turning it into a trilogy, despite the narrative being satisfactory done as it stands.

I was really struggling recently with my WIP, a story set in New York and heavily based on Japanese folklore. And by that, I really mean "Japanese". I had to be careful that the yokai I used as my characters weren't recent imports from China or Korea or other Far Eastern countries. Admittedly I had to stretch a point with my two leads (a kitsune and tanuki, who share a common origin in Chinese fox legends way way back when), then I wanted to add in a conflict with another country. I decided on China.

By this point in the story, I had three antagonists either introduced or planned, with one being a Daoist priest and the other being an inugami or malevolent dog spirit. But as I reached the final chapters, I just stalled. Completely and utterly. I could barely turn out four pages in three weeks, which for me is dismal progress. I took me the best part of those three weeks to realise what was going wrong. It was something I'd done previously and not corrected in earlier work. Too many characters.

Sounds an idiotic problem, right? But either in draft work or in published works, an overabundance of characters can be detrimental to a story. They can confuse the reader, clutter the narrative, cause gaps when some characters vanish for multiple chapters before reappearing as if nothing had happened. Kind of like Eragon? Of course that book has the opposite problem; keeping track of all the characters and constant scene switching bamboozles the reader.

The problem was solved by combining the Daoist and inugami into a single character. This both made more sense, and gave a little extra cohesion to the narrative. I had to rewrite about ten pages of text, but in the end it was worth it. It showed me I'm still prone to some old mistakes. I'm sure I'll have to watch that particular impulse all my life.


(Oh, and on a side note, due to Amazon's new book linking systems malfunctioning because of similar book titles, the book links on the pages for both volumes of The Leviathan Chronicle are redirecting to the wrong pages. Apologies for not catching it sooner, it appears to be a relatively recent problem. Hopefully this will be sorted in the near future.)