I’m coming to a point in the book where there are multiple conflicts between several of the main and secondary characters. There’s just one problem. I forgot about some of the characters.
The beginning of the book introduces the main characters, including all the characters involved in these conflicts. After that, several of them just disappear. The characters don’t have a major role in any of the main events that already happened, but they’re pivotal in the events to come.
Part of the problem is that there’s a disconnect between the characters and I. This includes one of the main antagonists (there’s an intra-kingdom power struggle that occurs during a war — the power struggle doesn’t really occur until the second half of the book, and his role is ancillary at best in the first half).
It’s one of those things I just can’t believe happened — I got so wrapped up in some of the earlier events, but these characters still needed attention. Now I’m finding that I have to go back and fill in these chapters — some of their backstory needs to come out before I can get to the conflicts, and the place that makes most sense to do it is earlier in the book.
I’m not sure if this was a planning failure (I’m not a huge fan of the chapter-by-chapter outline, just a more generalized “this is the order stuff is going to happen in outline”), or if it was just that the other characters were so insistent on telling me their story that it consumed my writing and the forgotten characters just couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
So here I am, going back into the first half of the book and adding additional material. I don’t consider this a “revision-addition” (the sections that you add after you read the entire book and realize that you should spend more time on X), because its fairly essential to the unwritten portion of the book. That said, I’m not going to worry too much about where I place them in the book — as long as they fits in the overall timeline — because I can always move these chapters around a little during the revision stage.
Before I can do any of that, however, I have to apologize to the characters and hope they’re still willing to share their tales.
