Drafting: The making of ‘The Mirror of Tantalus’ (part two)
Summary: The tools and process I used to write the second draft of my novelette, ‘The Mirror of Tantalus’ and some examples of the revisions I made at that stage of the story’s development
This is the second note in a little “making of” series about the development of my novelette, The Mirror of Tantalus. I love listening to artists talk about how they developed their work. You can learn so much from the chronicle of the ups and downs, the false starts and dead-ends, the discoveries made along the way. Hopefully, hearing a bit of my journey will be useful to you on yours.
In the previous note, I talked about how the original idea for Tantalus developed and the event that motivated me to write the story. In this note, I’ll talk about the early drafting phase.
Planning my schedule and finding time to write (Jan 2024)
I have three small children, a full-time job, and some commitments to community, like my local church. I must be intentional with my time. There are a lot of things I’d like to write about, but I have to prioritize. Planning for Tantalus was no exception.
I immediately faced a challenge: Writing a new story would take time, but I didn’t want to stop regularly publishing my notes on storytelling. How could I do both?
Thankfully, I’d participated in a free online writing course in 2023. I had several unpublished pieces from that, which I decided I could publish on a monthly schedule. That way, I could still consistently post something to my storytelling notes while having protected time to work on fiction.
In addition to those pre-written pieces, I also wanted to finish writing several new pieces in the story structure primitives series I was in the midst of publishing.
I planned for the first month or two of 2024 to be dedicated to completing the series. I could then switch to the fiction project, with the pre-written pieces as cover.
In my naivete, I expected both the primitives series and the drafting of my new story to be finished in the first four months of the year. That didn’t happen. The notes on primitives took me all the way into the spring. So, it wasn’t until March that I could finally point my attention completely toward Tantalus.
From first to second draft (Mar - Apr 2024)
Reverse outline and tools
I’d written a very rough first draft back in 2023. As I picked the project back up, I decided to do a “reverse outline.” That would help me see what material I had and discover what needed to be added, trimmed, or moved around.
For the reverse outline, I copied the story over to FigJam, a tool built to help design teams collaborate.
Using FigJam had two main advantages. First, switching contexts from Workflowy (my outlining and note-taking tool) to FigJam allowed me to see the story with fresh eyes. That always helps me catch things I’d otherwise miss.
Second, FigJam has a “sticky note” feature, which I find to be really helpful for building reverse outlines. I can put each scene beat on a different sticky note, arrange them by rows and columns, and categorize them by color. That helps me more clearly see what’s happening in the story on a high level and move bits around. It’s roughly analogous to writing out your scene beats on note cards and arranging them on the floor.
One more minor advantage of working in FigJam is that it’s a drawing tool. In the second draft, I needed to work out the blocking for the Confluence so that my descriptions would appropriately set up for the events that would later take place. It was helpful to be able to draw basic shapes — rectangles and circles and such — to think through the floorplan and the mechanics of the ship.
Drafting
Once I’d arranged the pieces, I began the second draft. I did a decent amount of writing and rewriting and shuffling at this point. In this draft, I worked out a lot of the exposition that supported the story. However, I still didn’t have some of the elements that would make the emotional core of the story, like the flashbacks of Charis’ dad.
I also landed on the character names.
Simplifying the story
Finally, in this draft I made some refining decisions.
For example, in the first draft, there were not two but three different sides in the conflict. One side was friendlier to the protagonist’s than the other. The delegate from the friendly side would save the protagonist’s life, and then the delegate from the third side would reveal himself to be an enemy and kill the friendly delegate.
Between the first and second drafts, I realized that I needed to simplify. One obvious way to do that would be to trim down from three sides in the conflict to two. Perhaps it could be someone on the protagonist’s own side that was the antagonist, rather than an outsider? I liked that direction. The betrayal would be more personal for the protagonist, and it would create a really interesting dilemma.
I played around with different options. Perhaps the protagonist’s side had a space marine hidden onboard, ready to jump out and take over once they got Tantalus’ data?
In the end, this line of thinking landed us with the character of Alex, who I feel is a decent execution of the idea.
As I finished up the second draft, the story had a lot more material than the first. It was nearly the shape that you read in the final piece, and I could turn my attention to the long, steady work of revising . . .
In the next note, I’ll talk about how the revisions went.
Onward!
You (yes, you!) can help
I need your feedback to make the story better.
First, read The Mirror of Tantalus
The Mirror of Tantalus (Beta)
17K words | 2hr reading timeWhen a strange interstellar object enters Earth’s system, Charis Samogost joins an unlikely alliance of nations sent to investigate. As they draw nearer to their goal, loyalties are tested, and Charis must decide what’s most important to her . . . and what she’s willing to do to get it.
After that, fill out a 5 min feedback form →
. . . And thank you for being here and catching up with my little journey.