I can turn back time.
I have the power to change the past.
It’s a heady feeling, to not only have lives under my control, but to make them go back and do what I want.
When I started my first draft (I mean my seventh first draft) I had no real ending. I had ideas of endings from my earlier versions but I wasn’t sure if it would quite fit. I decided to just keep writing and see what Lyra did when she and I got to the end.
She made some surprising decisions (not telling! no spoilers!) but not all of those decisions matched up with what she said or did earlier in the book.
So I changed her. In my second draft (eighth draft, really), I could change Lyra to better fit how she acts at the end.
But it’s not just the characters’ personalities I could change. I could go back and add in clues that hint at the end. It’s like knowing the answer in advance and then coming up with the riddles to solve (so much more satisfying!)
I’m two-thirds of the way through this second draft, coming up to important plot points that will lead Lyra to her ultimate decisions. As I craft her reaction to those events, I’m realizing that I don’t like my first-draft ending. Again, the concept is good, but I think if I left the end the way it was, my readers would roll their eyes and never pick up another book of mine again. Without giving anything away, Lyra offers an ultimatum to the bad guy that she knows is risky, but hopes he’ll accept. Now that I’ve taken a step back, there’s no way anyone in his right mind would accept such an ultimatum, so it makes no sense why Lyra would expect it to work.
So I am changing the ultimatum. Lyra now has something more concrete to offer. That means I need to introduce the “something” earlier in the book so the offer doesn’t come out of the blue at the end.
This reflects a famous principle:
Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.
— Anton Chekhov
Except I always thought the rifle on the wall was there first. I didn’t realize that as the author, I had the power to fire the gun before the rifle was on the wall!
I have the magic to go back in time and place the rifle on the wall.
Take that, Harry Potter.
