Writing Serial Fiction – Words Deferred

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 26

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Q & A

My intent with Razor Mountain was always to write a “mystery box” story that actually resolved in a satisfying way. To do that, I created a starting premise with a lot of mysteries, and then made sure that I knew the answers—why everything was happening. In the first half of the book, most of my time was spent building up those mysteries. Now, as I approach the final act, it’s all about answering those mysteries.

I’ve long believed that it’s easier to create interesting mysteries than it is to resolve them, which is why so many mystery-centric stories fall flat at the end. However, in my hubris, I assumed that the hard work was in figuring out all the answers. Some of the feedback on early drafts of recent chapters has shown me that it’s not enough to just know the answer. The resolution has to come out in the story, while being clear enough that the reader doesn’t miss it, and organic enough that it doesn’t feel shoved-in just to make the story work.

So, one of the things I did while writing this chapter is to go back through my outline and review all of the things I set up early in the story, and make sure that I have plans for resolving them in the next few chapters. This chapter and the next one are important to some of these revelations, so it was a good exercise to do at this point in the story.

More Rearranging

I initially left out the third scene in this chapter. It was squeezed into the start of the next chapter because I was worried that it might reveal too much before the next chapter. This is part of the ongoing rearranging of the outline that I’ve been doing for the past few chapters.

However, when I began to write this journal I realized that the chapter felt purposeless without that third scene. Seeing Cain is interesting, because it’s a big link between the two narratives, but it’s not exactly a shocking stinger at the end of the chapter, and I would have had to be a little more coy in Christopher’s conversation with Speares to try to make it more of a revelation. The first two scenes are mostly the characters walking from A to B and talking, which is the same as Christopher’s previous chapter. Without the additional revelations and action at the end, it falls flat.

So once again I adjusted my chapters and pulled in that third scene. I also decided that I can write it without quite giving up certain big secrets. But this scene combined with the next chapter will serve as the climax for Act II and set up Act III.

The Value of Journaling

Despite the power of ego, when I sit down to write one of these chapter journals I sometimes wonder how worthwhile it actually is. There are certainly times when feel that I don’t have much interesting to say about a given chapter. However, when I look back, it’s often when I’m working on a journal that I realize I’ve missed something or need to do some rearranging (as I did this week).

As it turns out, when I force myself to think about process enough to be able to articulate a journal entry, it helps me better understand the story I’m telling. Maybe that seems like it should be obvious, but it’s a lesson that I keep learning.

That’s partly because I originally intended these journals to be a sort of documentary—a way for other writers to peek inside my head and see what I was thinking, alongside the actual product. Not because I thought it would be a breakout bestseller and everyone would be interested, but because I can only speak for myself, and it seemed like a fun hook for the blog. I think there’s a real tendency among authors to want to keep the secret sauce secret, or to be so deep in the impostor syndrome that we don’t want to risk the potential embarrassment of opening up to others.

Now that I’ve been doing this for most of a book, I’m beginning to think that journaling through a big project will often be worthwhile for a lot of writers, even if nobody else ever sees that journal. As writers, we are used to thinking through a lot of things in text, and keeping up that meta-narrative has really helped me to understand the story I’m writing, and probably do a better job than I otherwise would.

It also occasionally serves as a record that I can return to, if I forget a decision I made, or an idea that I set aside that turns out to be important.

Next Time

The next chapter is a big one. Things are happening now. It’s been a few minutes since Christopher’s life got worse, so I’m going to remedy that with some existential dread. It’s the end of Act II and the start of Act III. See you there.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 25

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Narrative Convergence

God-Speaker’s chapters throughout Act II have been jumping through time, showing key moments in God-Speaker’s evolution. They’ve also shown the evolution of Razor Mountain and its people. In this chapter, the narrative is finally approaching the present day. For the first time, we can start to see the same things from both God-Speaker’s and Christopher’s perspective.

This gives me the opportunity to set up some narrative tension by revealing things in God-Speaker’s chapters that will pay off in Christopher’s chapters. Sometimes tension comes from not knowing what will happen next. Sometimes it’s more exciting when the reader can guess what’s happening, but the characters don’t know.

God-Speaker’s Cabinet

The two new characters introduced in this chapter are Reed and Cain, and they are both members of God-Speaker’s cabinet. However, I looked through my notes and I had no record of what their actual positions are. I was certain I had thought about this when I was first developing the story, but it turns out that writing a book is a messy process, and I either lost those notes or never wrote them in the first place.

Internally, to the citizens of Razor Mountain, the cabinet is a secret arm of the US government that handles the day-to-day operations in the city. Only God-Speaker and the secretaries themselves know the truth about who runs the city. The populace “knows” that the secretaries report to a higher authority, but they’re told it’s the President of the United States and the military. God-Speaker doesn’t need to worry that the population will try to overthrow their autocratic king, because they don’t know that they have a king.

When deciding what positions there should be in this cabinet, I looked at the US presidential cabinet for inspiration. Razor Mountain is a sort of city-state, so a lot of those positions make perfect sense. Others are completely unnecessary (ambassador to the UN) and a few just need to be tweaked.

I wanted a large enough group to seem like a reasonable governing body, and to allow for interesting interactions between members.

These are the positions I ended up with:

Secretary of the Treasury – Responsible for overall budget, accounting, and income and outflows across all departments. Administers local banking system.
Secretary of Agriculture – Responsible for local farming and food processing. Works with the Trade Coordinator for food imports from outside.
Secretary of Commerce – Responsible for most non-food businesses internal to the mountain. Works closely with Secretary of Labor and Trade Coordinator.
Secretary of Labor – Responsible for labor conditions, allocation of labor across industries, work safety, etc.
Secretary of Housing – Responsible for maintaining and expanding housing supply within the mountain as needed for the population.
Secretary of Energy – Responsible for generation and distribution of electric power, lighting, and certain energy-related trade (batteries, generation equipment, etc.)
Secretary of Education – Responsible for the school and university system.
Director of Media – Responsible for producing local media, importing external media, censorship.
Director of Intelligence Operations – Responsible for gathering internal and external intelligence, as well as most external interaction with outsiders for trade.
Secretary of Science and Technology – Responsible for science and tech R&D, manufacturing, and external trade. Collaborates with Intelligence Ops for external hacking.
Director of Military Operations – Responsible for military within the mountain and the area around the mountain. Collaborates with Intelligence Operations for external military and espionage ops.
Trade Coordinator – Responsible for import/export and maintaining trade. Collaborates with Intelligence Operations for external negotiations and obfuscation.

I decided that Cain is the Secretary of Energy. He is very focused on his particular field, and is especially excited about developing and constructing new electric generation and distribution technology.

God-Speaker would be constantly thinking about how to balance power between the cabinet members, and play them off each other so that nobody can ever feel secure or think about turning against him. To this end, I thought he would avoid involving the Secretaries of Intelligence Operations and Director of Military Operations when it comes to investigating their fellows. Instead, he turns to Reed, the Secretary of Labor, who naturally collaborates with the Secretary of Energy on his big building projects.

Resolving Mysteries and Emotional Catharsis

My goal throughout most of this book has been to draw the reader in with a series of mysteries. However, it’s not structured like a classic “who-done-it.” It’s not building up to a revelation that wraps up the plot. Instead, in Act III I will be trying to rapidly resolve most of the open questions that have given the story momentum so far.

Unraveling these mysteries will reveal more about God-Speaker and Christopher, and those revelations will leave Christopher with some difficult things to do, and some difficult choices to make. The end of the story will not be about big mysteries, it will be about the choices Christopher decides to make and why he decides to make them.

This whole structure goes back to one of the big lessons I learned from Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story: the big, world-shaking stakes should be tied directly to the main character’s “smaller” but more relatable personal stakes.

It will be up to Christopher to decide what the outcome is, for himself and for the world.

Next Time

Next chapter, we go back to Christopher as the two narrative worlds begin to collide.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 24

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Outlining is Hard

Once again, I am making small adjustments to the outline for the end of Act II. The end-result is two more big God-Speaker chapters, and one small Christopher chapter left to write. I don’t remember having to do much rearranging in Act I, but I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of it in Act II.

Originally, I decided to do more outlining up-front for Razor Mountain than I normally would. I wanted to make sure I knew all the answers to the questions so that I didn’t pull a LOST and write myself into a corner. In that sense, my outline has served me very well. I have a good idea of everything that I need to keep track of and reveal as I go.

The reason the chapters have changed is mostly to accommodate the flow of the story, which I don’t always have a good feel for until I’m actually in the middle of writing. What makes sense in the outline doesn’t always make sense as a sequence of scenes, especially as little things change along the way. So, I’m still writing everything that was in the outline, but slightly adjusting the order it appears in.

The fact that I have two different narratives in different time periods gives me some additional flexibility. Each narrative still follows a linear sequence, but I can choose how I switch between them in order to maximize the mystery or create the most tension.

Exposition is Hard

This chapter, much like the previous one, is a bit of an exposition dump in the form of conversation. I’m taking advantage of the assumption that Speares can be a little forthcoming with Christopher because he’s not leaving Razor Mountain, and anything he knows won’t be going back out into the world.

The challenge of Razor Mountain is that there is a lot of history and a lot of things I’ve had to figure out for the story to make sense, but it’s hard to get all of that across when most of the characters don’t actually know the truth about it. I also need to be careful of “prologue syndrome,” over-explaining all the back-story just because I know it and not because it’s necessary for the reader to understand the plot.

Next Time

The climax of Act II includes a two-chapter episode of God-Speaker’s story. The recent God-Speaker chapters jumped through time, but this bigger episode will give me room to introduce a couple new characters and jump into Act III with some big revelations.

Just in case anyone picked up on it—yes, it’s Jules Verne who wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth, not H.G. Wells as Speares says. She’s just not very well-versed in old-school “scientific romance” stories.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 23

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

A Pyrrhic Victory

Christopher is out of the jail cell. He has escaped the grasp of Sergeant Meadows, and found a much more sympathetic ear in Specialist Speares (assuming she is actually what she seems). Still, he’s not exactly free—he’s traded a cell for a mediocre apartment, and it’s still unlikely that he’ll ever be able to leave Razor Mountain.

His only chance to help himself is to learn how to navigate the bureaucracy of the mountain and plead his case. Unfortunately, he knows very little about how Razor Mountain works.

Christopher also feels different after his torturous ordeal. He is, perhaps, a little more in control of himself, a little more Zen, even if he can’t exert much control over the world around him. The change in his character is still subtle, but I’ll be trying to bring it out more as the story continues.

Answers

This chapter is a turning point in the structure of the story. So far, Christopher has been doing nothing but ask questions, and in this chapter he’s getting some answers. They aren’t particularly good answers for him, but at least he has a better idea what’s happening.

On the other hand, the reader knows about God-Speaker, and something is still amiss with the story of the mountain that Christopher is receiving. My goal in this chapter is to start revealing a little more about the mountain while still making the reader wonder what happened in the years between God-Speaker’s chapters and the modern day. Then the last few chapters of Act II will reveal the answers to that.

Mysteries and Choices

This was one of the longer chapters that I’ve written in Razor Mountain. There is a lot of information to get across, and a good amount of dialogue.

This book is very uneven when it comes to dialogue. It was clear early on that there would be very little dialogue in the first half of the book. Christopher is alone in all of those chapters, with nobody to talk to except himself. God-Speaker’s tribe talks, but they’re not exactly loquacious.

As we work through Act II and introduce new characters, there is more and more dialogue. I expect it to continue to increase toward the end of the book. I always wanted a structure where the mysteries and questions steadily pile up for the first half of the book, and then more and more of them get answered in the second half.

I also realized at some point that the whole book won’t be driven solely by mystery. Before the end, all the big questions will be answered. The answers to those questions will then force the main characters to make hard choices, and the ending will be about those choices and their consequences. It’s nice to solve the mystery, but characters need to struggle and grow and change for the ending to really hit home.

Next Time

Christopher learns more about Razor Mountain, and may actually get some good news.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 22

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Developing God-Speaker

In this chapter, I had two important things I wanted to accomplish. The first thing: showing a formative event for God-Speaker, where he once again loses someone close to him.

As I’ve mentioned previously, God-Speaker only gets about half as many chapters as Christopher in the book. This is partly because it draws out some of the mysteries, and partly because I want it to feel more like Christopher’s story than God-Speaker’s story.

In Act II, each of the God-Speaker chapters really needs to pull its weight in terms of developing God-Speaker’s personality, and revealing his long, long history. The challenge for me is that these chapters jump drastically through time and feature characters that only appear in a single chapter.

When a character dies, I usually want it to make a big impact on the reader. In the case of Strong Shield and Sky-Watcher, the reader barely knows these characters, and can’t really be expected to feel much for them. However, the purpose of these characters is really just to be foils for God-Speaker in different ways. They don’t have much development, but they have to help to build God-Speaker’s character.

Sky-Watcher accepts her own death with dignity, but God-Speaker does not. After all, he’s been alive for many lifetimes at this point, and he’s used to getting what he wants.

The Mechanics of Magic

The voices deep inside the mountain still aren’t completely explained. That’s a mystery that I want to draw out. However, there are plenty of hints about their origins that many readers will pick up on.

The voices provide God-Speaker with knowledge that would otherwise be far beyond human technological understanding at these points in time. This allows God-Speaker and his little civilization to excavate the underground city and make it livable.

The voices also give God-Speaker other powers, powers that seem to be beyond mere technological advancement. They give him the ability to live far beyond a normal human lifetime by transferring his consciousness to a new body. In this chapter, I also try to explain the mechanics of the “oracles,” specially trained people who can use the voices to move their consciousness through time instead of space.

I’ve found it a little challenging to clearly describe the mechanics of the “magic” while not making it feel like straight exposition. I may revisit this in a later editing pass.

Approaching the Present

In my outline, there are only two God-Speaker chapters left—in Act II and in the book as a whole. The final act of the book will belong to Christopher. These last two God-Speaker chapters will both take place in the same time period, bringing us within a couple decades of the modern day, in the final big time jump of the narrative.

This is an exciting part of the book for me, because it’s where the two main characters’ narratives finally come together. It also marks the point where a lot of the mysteries will be resolved.

Next Time

We’re back to Christopher for a long chapter. We’ll see a little bit of the modern state of the underground city, and see that things are not quite right. Christopher is still trying to get back home, but it seems less likely than ever that he’ll ever leave Razor Mountain.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 21

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Anchor Scenes

When it comes to writing, I am a planner. To a lot of people, that just means having an outline rather than writing and seeing what comes out. However, there are really several phases to planning, especially when it comes to a big project like a novel.

For me, the first phase of planning is really just collecting ideas. There has to be some set of ideas that get me excited enough to say, “Yeah, I want to put hundreds of hours of effort into making this book.” Often, these ideas aren’t enough to provide a start-to-finish synopsis of the story, but they are important moments, so they tend to be the things that cluster around the beginning, the end, or act breaks. Occasionally, they’re just something cool that happens in the middle, and that’s fine too.

That collection of exciting ideas are like mountain peaks in the fog. They’re moments in an incomplete story. To make a real story, I have to figure out all the obscured parts—I have to blow away all that fog in between.

Before I really start to put together a proper outline (and even while I’m outlining), I tend to act out those scenes in my head and think about what the characters might do and say. Sometimes I come back to the same scene over and over and discover new details or different directions they could go.

For Razor Mountain, these were things like Christopher waking up alone on the plane and the moments leading up to jumping out; his journey into the wilderness, and facing the choice of going back to safety or continuing on without any certainty of success; or God-Speaker falling down into the depths of the glacier and discovering that the stone god is broken and he is utterly alone.

A lot of the ideas in this chapter came to me later in the process, but it still feels like one of those anchor scenes. When I first conceived this book, I didn’t know about Chris Meadows yet. I didn’t have a complete understanding of Razor Mountain, and I didn’t know exactly how Christopher would get there. What I did know was that Christopher would have to be broken down completely. He doesn’t know it yet, but this is the experience that allows him to really change.

The rest of the story will be about him figuring out why he is who he is, and whether he wants to do something to change that.

Capturing Dreaminess

I got to play around with style a little bit in this chapter. Christopher is in a dreamlike state, sleep-deprived and tortured on top of everything else that has happened to him since the beginning of the book.

I wanted parts of this chapter to feel more concrete, as though we’re with him in the room, and parts to be more dreamlike, to the point where it’s not entirely clear what is real and what is hallucination, what is memory, and what is happening in the moment.

To make time feel disjointed, I added an unusual number of narrative breaks within the chapter. The story jumps back and forth between (what we can assume to be) multiple interviews with Sergeant Meadows and descriptions of Christopher’s mental state and thoughts. I also used an unusual number of short sentences and sentence fragments in the dialogue and descriptions to show how unfocused and disjointed his thoughts are. A side-effect of this is that longer sentences stand out, and I used that to draw attention to one or two things.

The third trick I used was substituting italics for quotes in some of the dialogue. I think this makes Christopher’s quoted dialogue feel more immediate, while Meadows’s italicized dialogue makes him seem more distant. It also has the side-effect that it’s much easier to follow the back-and forth without any dialogue tags. There’s no description in these parts either—just two disembodied voices—and that also adds to the dreamlike quality.

Finally, I added a section where I switch to first-person for the first time in the book. Honestly, I suspect I wouldn’t have had the guts to try something like this if I hadn’t read and analyzed The Martian and seen how many times Andy Weir jumped between perspectives and tenses, and how seamless it all felt.

I initially tried the change in perspective to untangle some gnarly sentences where it just wasn’t clear which person the pronouns were referring to. However, I kept it because it puts the reader deep into Christopher’s perspective at the exact moment when he is most vulnerable. This is a big reveal of something only lightly hinted at, a key piece of Christopher’s background.

With any stylistic experiments there’s a risk of failure, but I’m happy with how this chapter turned out. I think the experiments paid off.

Next Time

In chapter 22, we’re coming back to God-Speaker, once again leaping ahead through history. We’ll see a formative time in his life, and a little more information about Razor Mountain, the mysterious voices within, and their powers.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 20

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

A Long Wait for a Short Chapter

Chapter 20 might be the shortest chapter so far.

I went into Thanksgiving week thinking that I would get a lot of writing done. That didn’t happen. The kids had activities, we helped a family member move, and the actual Turkey Day prep didn’t help either. On top of that, we’ve had some family medical issues lately and multiple home appliances dying. It’s been a lot.

As a serial procrastinator, I have a lot of baggage around making plans and then not getting things done. However, I’m getting a little better at looking at it objectively, and it was pretty reasonable to not get much writing done. I try to chalk it up to life intruding, and adjust my plans accordingly.

I’m taking quite a bit of vacation at the end of December and January, and I’m hoping to really reset and have lots of free time for all my writing projects. I think it will also help if I can finish off Act II and get into Act III of Razor Mountain. I’m feeling some of the mid-book doldrums and I usually get a second wind when the end is in sight.

Approaching the Breaking Point

This latest chapter ended up being yet another short one. Part of that is down to the fact that there’s no dialogue or other characters for Christopher to interact with. Part of it is because I don’t want to spend too long on these scenes where it’s just him in an empty room having a bad time—just enough to set up what will be happening in subsequent chapters.

I wanted to get across the visceral awfulness, and the feeling that Christopher really getting close to his breaking point. He has been through a lot, and he is worn down. At some point it’s going to be too much.

But we’re not quite there yet.

Serial Villains

Razor Mountain doesn’t have a big, bad, ongoing villain throughout the entire story. In terms of high school English conflict definitions, it’s more “man vs. nature” and “man vs. self.”

What it does have is a series of minor villains that cause problems for the main characters. God-Speaker had to deal with Finds-the-Trail and Strong-Shield. Christopher was kidnapped by Garrett and Harold, and is now imprisoned under the purview of Sergeant Matthews.

It’s challenging to make these villains menacing when most of them are only around for a few chapters. Their main effect on the story is acting as roadblocks that the main characters have to somehow overcome, but they need to feel like an organic part of the story. They need enough character development that their actions make sense and hint that there’s more going on with them than we get to see. They need motivations that put them at odds with the main characters.

A notable effect of chaining villains in this way is that it naturally results in arcs of tension as each conflict ramps up, and then is overcome or superseded by the next conflict. This can be good, because it provides a natural structure of rising and falling action—you need both moments of tension and release to keep the story interesting—but it can also create lulls in the action that I need to make sure aren’t too long or boring.

Next Time

Chapter 21 might just be the straw that breaks Christopher’s back. We’ll get to know our new friend, Sergeant Matthews, the first Razor Mountain authority figure that Christopher has encountered. Things are going to get worse before they get better. If they get better.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 19

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Language Research

For this chapter, I did some research into Proto-Inuit and Proto-Eskimoan language in order to come up with the character names. I already knew what I wanted the meaning of each name to be, so it was a matter of scanning through research papers and websites to find words that fit the meaning and also sound good to my ear.

It’s always a little harrowing writing anything in a language you’re not proficient with, because it’s very easy to miss bad connotations or grammatical rules that alter the meaning. This is a pretty mild case since each of these names are simple phrases and the languages are ancestors of modern languages with relatively small speaking populations. Getting something wrong in French is much more likely to be caught by readers and pull them out of their immersion than getting something wrong in proto-Inuit.

I still like to get it right though, for the sake of craftsmanship and out of respect for the language and the people who spoke it, regardless of what it is.

Building God-Speaker

One of the challenges of an effectively immortal character is that you have such a large span of time to populate, and then such a limited number of scenes to actually show. Act I showed God-Speaker’s origin and how he came to Razor Mountain. Act II is jumping through time specifically to showcase particular formative moments for him. Hopefully this will give the reader not only an understanding of who he is, but why he is that way.

Some of the reader feedback I got for this chapter was that we know almost nothing about the relationship between God-Speaker and Strong-Shield, so it’s hard to care about their fight. That is a valid concern. On the other hand, Strong Shield only lives in this one chapter. I have to limit the amount of words I spend on him. What really matters to me in this scene is that we see what God-Speaker is doing and the state of Razor Mountain.

These chapters will end up being a sort of slide-show, little moments from a long span of history. They will mention or hint at other things that happen in the mountain, but there will necessarily be a lot that is left out. Novels are full of choices like this, and I chose to go a particular way. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was the “right” way or the “best” way (if such a thing even exists).

Immortality

Chapter sixteen ended with God-Speaker seeking immortality. While this chapter isn’t explicit about how much time has passed, it does reveal that he is in a new body.

I thought spending more time on this resurrection, but I decided against it. His new body is mentioned in passing, and this keeps an air of mystery around the process. We know that the voices in the mountain are somehow involved, but we don’t know the exact mechanism of it. The reader understands that God-Speaker can live beyond a normal human lifespan, but there are still questions to string us along. I like this kind of partial answer as a way to dole out information without completely giving up the mystery.

Next Time

Going by my outline, there are three more God-Speaker chapters in Act II. However, next time, in Chapter 20, we are back to Christopher, who is having his own bad times in a prison cell under Razor Mountain.

Razor Mountain — Bonus Development Journal

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

But Wait…There’s More!

I write and edit each chapter of Razor Mountain as a single cohesive unit, but I’ve been splitting each chapter into multiple parts, usually between 1,000 and 1,500 words. For blog posts, this is supposedly the sweet spot for keeping readers’ attention, and it lets me draw out each bit of the story over a couple of days, to mitigate the fact that I usually only produce a new chapter every two weeks.

I sometimes take little notes as I’m writing, and once I’m done with a chapter I write the development journal for it. Usually this means I post the parts of the chapter early in the week, and the dev journal on a Friday.

A week ago, I released Chapter 17 in two parts and thought I was done with it. I posted the development journal. I did get feedback from my wife that this chapter felt a little short and ended abruptly, but I thought that was perfectly fine, and I moved on to working on Chapter 18.

As I wrote Chapter 18, I realized that it was going to be a short one, probably not even long enough to split into two parts. And then I realized that Chapter 17 flowed directly into it, with no significant shift in time or location. I reread the part of the chapter I had finished, and I had to admit, it was really a continuation of Chapter 17.

So, I decided to merge this into the previous chapter. This week I’ll post it as Chapter 17.3, and I’m posting this “mini” development journal to explain why.

Outlining and Flexibility

I am the kind of writer who likes to outline. For Razor Mountain, I knew I was going to be posting chapters as I wrote them. That’s a scary prospect, so I spent more time outlining in detail than I ever have for any other project before.

I know there’s supposedly this great schism among writers who outline or don’t outline, but I think it’s a false dichotomy. There’s a spectrum of more or less preparation, and more or less tweaking the story as you write it.

We outliners are a little smug about knowing exactly what’s going to happen in the story, but that can be dangerous. You can miss the opportunities for improvement that present themselves during the writing process, because they don’t “fit into the plan.”

The outline is an invaluable resource for me. I can’t imagine embarking on a project like Razor Mountain and not knowing exactly how I want the plot to flow or not knowing how it will all end. I’m not that kind of writer, and I’ve seen too many serialized stories crash and burn. But I also refuse to be beholden to the outline. I consolidated several chapters in the first act, and I’m happy to do it again. I’ve changed and adjusted a few minor plot points. The outline is a tool, a safety net, to be used only as long as it’s helpful.

The Upshot

The downside of making changes as you go, and the reason some writers are loathe to deviate from the outline, is that any significant changes mean the outline has to change too. Razor Mountain is a story of two different timelines, Christopher and God-Speaker, and thanks to my particular mental proclivities I have arranged it so that we get two Christopher chapters followed by a single God-Speaker chapter. Combining or eliminating chapters throws that off.

While that kind of consistent formula appeals to me, I don’t feel the need to force it when it doesn’t serve the story. Conveniently, the two timelines are fairly independent. The characters exist thousands of years apart, so while adjacent chapters may relate to one another indirectly or share similar themes, most of the book is fairly amenable to small re-orderings of individual chapters. I can probably pull chapters back to fill in the “gap” left by combining these two chapters. I just need to make sure the pacing feels good.

As evidenced by this post, this unexpected change also throws off my posting schedule. This sort of thing would have worried me back when I first started posting Razor Mountain. However, I’m now a year into the project (holy shit, yes, it really has been a year), and I’m slowly becoming less precious about the blog and how I present my fiction to the universe at large. As a small-time blogger, I now work under the assumption that none of my readership cares about my posting schedule as much as I do.

Besides, the whole point of this project was to provide a radically open view into my writing process, and I think this is a great example of that. Look for Chapter 17.3 this week, and then a return to the usual schedule.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 17

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Writing After Time Off

This chapter took a little longer than usual because of my Covid vacation, which mostly involved sleeping and being unproductive. This particular break was outside my control, but I’ve taken plenty of writing breaks in the past. I’ve never been a very consistent writer, so I’m no stranger to taking time off, but this blog has been slowly helping me get better at that.

The challenge for me with time off from writing is almost always just the mental block on getting started again. It’s not exactly writer’s block. Getting myself to write that first sentence is like pulling my own teeth, but once I’m a paragraph or two in, I can usually set my writing cruise-control for a while. It helps a lot to have a project like Razor Mountain, because I can write from a detailed outline. Most of the plot problems are small and easy to solve.

Mixed Feelings in the Middle

Looking at chapters, we are dead center in the middle of the book. We’ll have to wait and see how it shakes out in terms of wordcount. For me, this is always the most nebulous part of the story. That may be because I rarely feel comfortable working on a story unless I already have a detailed understanding of the beginning and the end. It just doesn’t feel like a proper story until I have those elements.

The beginning is all about introducing characters and problems and settings. It’s busy. The ending is the most exciting part, because it’s full of problems being resolved and characters making important decisions and mysteries finally revealed.

The middle is more trouble. The middle is the glue. It’s the throughline that gets you from the beginning to the end. The middle is the most flexible part. It’s also usually the part with the most difficult decisions and problems to figure out. As a result, the middle is where I do most of my second-guessing and wondering whether I’m going in the right direction.

The issue I have right now with the middle of Razor Mountain is that it feels like a lot is going on—there are new characters in every chapter, new time-jumping narrative for God-Speaker, and a lot of shifting mysteries where some things are revealed while bringing up new questions. That all sounds pretty good on paper, but I have some doubts over whether all of these things will feel like a logical sequence of events or more like distracting degressions.

All of this is further exacerbated by putting each chapter up online for the world to see, as I write it. I have to accept that I may be writing imperfect story beats (and let’s be real, they’re never perfect), and that people will actually see them before I finish the thing and edit and polish as much as I would like.

The advantage of experience is that I know I always feel this way to some extent in the middle of the story. I can keep writing through it and come out on the other side with a more informed perspective. Looking back from the end of the book, I may choose to pull some plot points or change what happens. And the advantage of putting the story out there in this state is that I hopefully get a little less precious about my stories and get a little better at pushing forward and writing the thing.

A Lack of Agency

The other issue that I’ve been thinking about here in the middle of the book is how much agency Christopher has over the story. God-Speaker will be doing a lot for the next few chapters, but Christopher is at the mercy of other characters for a while. In these parts, his agency has to come from his thoughts and reactions, and how he chooses to react to the lack of control over his external situation.

My goal is to use these scenes to further develop Christopher’s character and set him up for the challenges and choices that will happen in later chapters.

Next Time

Chapter 18 continues Christopher’s forced march with the kidnapping brothers as they make their way toward Razor Mountain.