Revisions: The making of ‘The Mirror of Tantalus’ (part three)

Summary: The story of working through the third and fourth drafts of my novelette, ‘The Mirror of Tantalus’

This is the third 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 I wrote the second draft of Tantalus, the tools I used, and a few of the story elements that developed during that draft. In this note, I’ll talk about the third and fourth drafts, which saw the heaviest revisions.

Third draft (Apr - Jun 2024)

I started the third draft working on refinements for things that had come up in the second draft. This draft also saw a lot of churn. I’d play around with an idea for something to add to the story. Then later, I’d realize it didn’t contribute anything meaningful and I needed to abandon it.

I wrote the third draft in a tool called Obsidian. This allowed me to work in more of a traditional, document-oriented format without all the fussiness of Microsoft Word. It also afforded me some nice quality of life things like word count, which my earlier tools didn’t provide.

Charis’ father: the emotional core

The third draft was where the story of Charis’ dad emerged.

From probably the first draft, I’d known that the relationship would be important. I played with various ideas. For example, her dad could be a physicist, and I could do a flashback of him explaining gravity concepts to her and her brother.

Then I wrote the scene with young Charis and her dad piloting the ship, and I knew I found something worthwhile. There was an immediate synergy between the emotion of the scene and the connection to her talent for piloting. It was a core identity scene for Charis. It frames who she is in the story. I knew I wanted to keep it.

With that, plus the decision to give Charis’ dad a background as an asteroid miner and separated from Charis’ mother, the rest of his influence in the story came together rather quickly.

I printed off a physical copy of the third draft to read and make notes. Similar to the switch from WorkFlowy to FigJam, this helped me see the story fresh again and catch things that I felt needed to be re-worked.

Fourth draft (Jun - Sep 2024)

After that, I was back in Obsidian working on what was now the fourth draft. This was mostly addressing the things that had emerged from the read-through of the printed version, and it was more-or-less procedural. Look at the problem. Create a solution. Fit it into the story. Go on to the next thing. Repeat.

By the end of the draft, I’d gotten to the place where I knew I needed an outside opinion. Before I did any further refinements, I wanted to make sure the major movements of the story weren’t broken. There would be no sense in polishing prose if a bunch of material still needed to be shuffled around or was fundamentally unsound.

In preparation for sending the draft to an editor, I took a hard look at the exposition in the beginning of the story. In drafts two and three, I’d discovered a lot of information I needed to communicate to set up the story. But a bunch of extra worldbuilding had sneaked in, too. I worried that the story was getting bogged down, and I felt insecure about that. So before sending Tantalus to an editor, I tried to trim out as much exposition as I could . . .

In the next note, I’ll talk about working with an editor.

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 time

When 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.

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. . . And thank you for being here and catching up with my little journey.

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