After tinkering and polishing a bit on my first draft of A Lady of Morandau, which was completed in exactly a year, I began work on the sequel. I didn't consider the first book finished, but I had some ideas for what came next, and I wanted to write them down. Now, after some time away from the first book, I'm coming back to it and seeing what it still needs. I post this because I've found it interesting to discover just what kind of thing you do in a novel's second draft. In my case, at least, I'm not really going to make any enormous changes. The basic plot outline isn't changing. But there's more to it than just tinkering and polishing.

My situation is that the first book that I originally planned was turning out to be enormous, so I decided to make a cut at around 125,000 words, and save the rest for the sequel. I think this was a good decision for several reasons. Polishing and tinkering have tended to add more words than they remove, so I'm pushing 130,000 words now. That's already long for a first novel.

Also, since my ambition is to write an exciting adventure story, I've been trying to make the story work as a movie, too. Actually having it turn into a movie would be a pie-in-the-sky best case, when I'm by no means sure the thing is publishable at all, but what I mean is that the kind of book I want to have written is a book that reads like an action flick. Imagining it as a movie is my way of trying to keep up momentum. If I write a chunk and realize that it wouldn't really work in a movie, then I need to take it out. This is not supposed to be a novel of ideas. Anyway, action films normally only run about two hours. I'm not sure whether that's just a coincidence of cinema economics or something, or whether it reflects some kind of medium constraint for fast-paced stories in general, but rightly or wrongly, the movie metaphor was telling me to wrap things up. And I think that is right. For me, books much longer than 140,000 words have mostly been books that seemed to drag in places. My aim is not to drag.

So, fine, I realized that I actually did have a good ending point at a reasonable length. It just wasn't the ending point I'd originally had in mind. What I have to do in the second draft, I've discovered, is to deal with the consequences of this.

The truncated story lacked coherence as it was. It didn't have a clearly discernible shape to it; it wasn't clear where it was going. The shape that the longer version was going to have was classic: girl meets boy, girl leaves boy, girl goes back to boy. There were going to be all sorts of alarums and excursions, but what was going to be the basic shape of the story was just, Here are these two people; look how they get together.

In retrospect, of course, that was very probably a ridiculous basic shape for an adventure story; but it did hang together, such as it was. Assuming that any readers would actually sit through the thing as I had it planned, you could have poked them and asked, "So what's this about?" and I think they could have answered, correctly, "It's about this girl, and this guy she meets." Then they could have gone on to describe what they two character were like, and I'd have been happy to think that my book had been understood.

The shortened version now only makes it as far as girl meets boy. If adventure-novel-as-character-study was a stupid idea in the longer version, it's totally broken in the short form. There's no tension and resolution in merely meeting up. So what I'm doing now, in the second draft, is something I think of as re-balancing. I have to redistribute weight, in a sense, so that there is a clearly recognizable thread running through the whole story — what in German is called a roten Faden.

In fact there will be three threads, related but distinct. One of these will still just be developing the two main characters, to the point where it's clear that if they get together, they will change the world. But since that thread just doesn't go far enough in this volume, there will be two others as well. One new thread is the source of the mysterious skull artifact that appears in Chapter 1: who made that thing, and why? The other new thread is the relationship between the Morandau, as gunslinging mercenaries, and the quasi-medieveal 'natives' who are their clients and victims. The natives are barbaric, but is what the Morandau are doing really the only alternative to something far worse?

Neither of these two new threads is really new. Both were already important in the first draft of the story; in fact, they were the obvious two important threads in it, apart from the characters themselves. It's just that, before, they were clearly sub-threads. They were always running in the background, but they were only really highlighted now and then. You could lose sight of them for several chapters, in places, before they would come back into focus.

So what I'm doing now, in the second draft, is promoting these prominent sub-threads into top-level threads, throughout the story. I'm making sure that they figure somehow, at least, in every chapter, and that they receive enough emphasis that they never fade from the reader's attention. Mostly I'm doing this by adding dialog — sometimes just a line, sometimes a couple of pages — in which the characters talk about these two threads. The major events of the plot already did feature both threads prominently; what I'm mostly doing now is just pointing this out.

In principle there may be a risk of overdoing this kind of thing. Maybe at some point it just becomes monotonous, to keep banging the reader over the head with the book's main threads. The only way to check for this, I think, will be to get reader feedback once I've got a finished second draft. For now, though, I'm going on the theory that it's much better to err on the side of keeping on yanking the major threads into prominence.

I think it's too easy, as an author who has been living with the story for more than a year, to know where it's all really going and what it's about. As an author, I know what parts are meant to be important, and what parts are meant to just be decorations. But unless you resort to boldface and footnotes, which is certainly weird and probably ineffective, then as far as the reader is concerned, major threads and decorative details are just paragraphs in the same font. If you give something space, then the reader takes it as important. Importance is also raised, I think, when the same thing gets mentioned repeatedly within the reader's short-term memory. So if you spend three whole pages describing some gadget, and then give it another paragraph in the very next chapter, then the reader is going to look for it to be a major plot device for at least the next several chapters, even if in your authorial intention it's just a bit of background color. Conversely, if something goes unmentioned for three chapters, then for the reader it's unimportant, even if in the author's mind it's the Main Plot. (Yes, your book might still survive if you let the Main Plot simmer in the background a bit; but I really believe this: if you do that, your book will be seriously weakened.)

This is the sort of thing I mean by 'balance' in a story: keeping the right things prominent, from the ignorant viewpoint of a first-time reader. I suspect that somebody reading a book they haven't read before needs quite a lot of blatant cuing in order to recognize what's going on, and I think this must be one of the tricks of writing that is almost impossible to notice just by reading, because I think a reader takes narrative coherence too much for granted to even be aware of all the mechanisms that keep it maintained. So I'll be going through each chapter, working in clear emphasis on my three main threads. Maybe later I'll have to go back yet again and soften this a bit, if it's too heavy-handed; but at this point I think it's a clear improvement that will make the whole story much sharper and faster-moving.

I've also decided that the third of the book's three main sections — the one with the really confusing tangle of deceptions — is still not working, after all. The deceptions work okay, I think, but the general tone is somehow wrong. Too much depressed musing, too little action. It's good for this section to be somehow oppressive, and for its violent ending to come as both surprise and relief, but ironically detached depression is too static a form of oppressiveness, for an action novel. Rising panic will be a much better alternative, I think. So I'll try to modulate the same tune into this different key. I'll do that by making the villains more vivid and active, and having them persecute the oppressed narrator much more aggressively. I'll let him survive repeatedly by using his wits, but I'll show him being steadily backed into a corner.

This will mean keeping most of what I already have in this section, but kind of re-forging it. It will mean another big bout of moving exposition into dialog — that's just always a good idea, I'm coming to think. And I'll have to add a fair amount of new dialog and action, as well. The finished second draft will probably approach 140,000 words. It will be the same story, but better.