Developing Mister D / The Infernal Aether

Killing the Darlings

I now have a skeleton that's starting to take shape, although there's still work to be done in terms of the characters and certain plot devices. While I'm doing so, I thought I'd share with you a few things I've learnt so far in this process.

As I mentioned previously, I genuinely thought I had a story outline in place. However, my approach has always been to use flip cards to set out scenes, giving me an outline to fill in as I went along. This was fine for getting writing quickly, but I often found that I would run out of steam at some point.

Writing out the skeleton so far has been hard work but has reaped dividends.

The first was realising just how little of the story I had actually worked out. Writing it out in long form, rather than bullet pointed notes, forced me to think through exactly what was going to happen, as well as when and to whom.

It also provided a structure for D L Mackenzie to review and critique, in particular focusing on the order of the stories I was trying to tell. I'm seeing this as a series of connected short stories culminating in a near-novella length end story, all of which stitch together into one long storyline. This was partly for practice (I have tried and failed to write novel-length stories in the past, and wanted to start a bit slower this time) but also because that was how the characters and the stories were coming over to me.

However, it's always easy to get lost in the detail, and D L Mackenzie pointed out that the order I had set out didn't quite work in terms of the flow and build up of tension. I thought about the revised running order he proposed, and then another point occurred to me - some of the stories I had originally thought to include simply didn't work.

The beauty of this process was it has made me realise which stories really do stand on their own, and which ones are just convenient plot devices and coincidences. It quickly became apparent to me that the first story I posted on this site, The Exploding Moon, was one such story. I saw this as a great way to introduce the characters with a bang, as well as give Maxwell the magical and occult knowledge that he needed for the story to progress.

However, as D L Mackenzie pointed out, the danger of starting with an exploding celestial body is that everything else that follows is in danger of becoming an anticlimax. It made sense to move this story down the running order but, as soon as I did, the story started to unravel. If the story wasn't the first one then it didn't make sense to include the scenes where the characters met each other as well as the transfer of demonic knowledge to Maxwell. Removing these didn't leave too much else in the story.

I have been attached to the story, but I also know I need to be ruthless, and I had had a niggling feeling for a while that it didn't quite work, wasn't quite as suspenseful as I wanted it to be. So The Exploding Moon has been stripped from the story I'm writing. I'm going to leave it on my Wattpad page though, and may return to it at some point in the future.

Similarly, with an aspect of the second story I put on Wattpad - the Monkey which Mister D (or N'yotsu as I'm learning to call him) creates from his body. As I wrote my skeleton I came to realise that in the Monkey I had created something I always dislike in other stories - a convenient plot device, rather than a creature in its own right. It was a useful way of injecting humour into the story and became a great "get out of jail free card" - every time the characters got into trouble, up popped Monkey to rescue them with an amusing quip.

Again, I enjoyed writing the Monkey character, but I've forced myself to be ruthless and written it out. In doing so I may have taken the stories down a bit of a darker route, but I think (hope!) that it's forced my other characters to be more rounded, if only in having to work out how to escape on their own account from the nasty situations I'm putting them into!