Depth and detail

 I've now finished the first draft of my rewrite of my 2009 novel, and I've realised I'm going to need another complete rewrite of the manuscript.  The principal reason for this is that I started out using the original draft as my foundation text, and altered it for the new draft.  But the problem with that original manuscript is that it really showed up my weaknesses as a writer.  It reflected the lack of depth and detailed description which I thought was okay back in 2009.  So I needed to fix that, to really flesh out the narrative.

There was another major reason why I needed to do a complete new draft.  I started out by using all the characters from my original draft, but there were far too many of them,  The characters are two teams sent to a planet to investigate a suspected religion.  Because women and men live in segregated settlements in some regions I'd decided I needed separate women's and men's teams.  All very logical so far.

The problem came when I started describing the teams in action.  It was when I got to a shuttle landing scene where I was trying to introduce and describe four people at once that I realised I didn't need all of them.  That was confirmed later when I had some of them speaking one line of dialogue just to remind the reader that they were still there.

Half of those characters weren't doing anything useful, and I realised I didn't need them all.  So part of the next rewrite will be excising those characters from the story.  Four of them will be deleted.

The other problem with the manuscript was the lack of detail.  I gave the reader no backgrounds for my characters.  They had no backstory or history.  That led into the wider problem of not enough detail in the story.  I talk about my characters walking through a city, but I don't name the park they went into, and I didn't tell the reader what types of trees were in that park.  I don't have them recalling similar places or situations from their past when that would be relevant.

Early on, a key scene takes place in a structure that's modelled on a Roman amphitheatre, but I needed to add far more detail to that brief description.  There are speakers hidden under the circular tiers of seats which amplify the drum rhythms the priests use to put their audience into thrall.  That important detail didn't exist in the original.  

So a lot of my time on this rewrite was spent slowing down and asking myself  'What do the characters see here?'. I don't visualise easily, so this is always a challenge for me, but it is a necessary task to make the book work.  And now I know the names of the parks and what types of trees grow there.