It's Cloudy...

As writers, we know our stuff is brilliant.  After all, we wouldn’t have written it down unless we were certain of said brilliance, right.  The problem comes when we want to show the world that brilliance and put it all into a single story, for it makes our stories, at times, unnecessarily complex.  As such, the level of complexity can either bore or confuse the reader, and bored or confused readers don’t buy your books.

One of my still-needs-to-be-rewritten novels fell into this trap – the sequel to Akeldama.  The novel centers around an ancient enemy returning and being granted power by the serpent at the end of the previous novel in exchange for a few favors.  The biggest ask revolves around opening several portals to Hell.  Sounds simple enough, right?

Wrong.

You see, I’ve come across tales of nearly a dozen different portals to Hell across the world, and I wanted to include them all in the book.  I wanted to do this to show how excited I was about the level of knowledge I’d obtained, which is almost always the wrong reason to include certain storypoints.  I also wanted a depth of story that was unwarranted, because, excited though I was, even I knew I couldn’t go through all 11 gates – some had to have been done “off screen” so as to build the tension and add mystery.  Still, I wanted to go through enough of the gates, and it ended up being a contrived mess rather than anything useful for the plot.  Hence the need for a pretty big rewrite.

Although it will pain me to do, I will dramatically prune the story from 11 gates to seven, and at least two will be done away from the gaze of the reader.  That should up the stakes much more for what the reader does see.  And hopefully it’ll get away from what I call “Christmas Present Syndrome,” whereby there are so many presents that kids just move from one to the next without appreciating what they just unwrapped.

The lesson in all of this is that we authors need to restrain ourselves sometimes in throwing our story out there.  We may enjoy the byzantine maze of subtle plot points, but we have to bear in mind the audience and whether or not they’re up for it.  Maybe they are, but we should be objective about it rather than just believe they want to wade through the clouds with us.