Impressions Update: Part Two

You might think from the timing of this post that I am hugely behind on Impressions writing, and that I slacked off enormously after finishing part one.  While I am behind where I wanted to be, since I wanted to have the whole novel finished before the end of 2023, I actually finished part two back in November, so I’m not quite as far behind as it might appear.  In fairness, I originally planned on the whole novel being 120,000 words, and it is instead looking to be closer to 180,000, so I ended up writing about the number of words I intended to in the year.  These things happen.

This post isn’t supposed to be about my writing schedule, however – it is supposed to be about part two, which I finally finished writing.  This is the middle of Impressions, and you’ll hear a lot of authors complain about writing middles.  They’ll say that they feel like the story loses momentum in the middle, like they run out of excitement for the topic, and like they get lost, mired in try-fail cycles that go nowhere and don’t progress the plot.  I don’t tend to feel that way about middles; in fact, my greatest challenge in Impressions’ second part was keeping the middle to a reasonable length and not bogging it down for the reader.  This goes back to the timing piece that we discussed in a previous post.  Such an enormous span of time and therefore events takes place within the middle section of this particular book that it was difficult to decide what sequences are most important to show, and how to write them and Raven in such a way as to convey how he is evolving and maturing over time.  Raven ages over ten years in this part alone.

Part of what stretched part two longer than I anticipated was getting Raven out of Higintslurg.  In my original rough outline, part two consisted almost wholly of Raven wandering around Vigoth and Higintsborough, investigating Hebalon ruins, meeting villagers, and otherwise doing what, in the current version, only occupies the final few chapters.  I’m quite pleased with the direction that the part took, instead – it is far more interesting, in my opinion, and makes Raven far more dynamic – but it does mean that even more of the time takes place off-page, in erratic chunks.

Impressions, especially the first two parts, is an odd book, and I am interested to see what feedback I receive on it from my writing group and other readers.  It does not follow a defined plot structure, and it is more like an interpretation of a historical memoir set in a fantasy world but written in third person limited (and I do wonder about changing to third person omniscient in revisions).  While I as the author know where the story is going, unlike in many fantasy novels I imagine that the reader won’t necessarily guess in advance where the story is going.  My concern, therefore, is that the reader will feel lost and disengaged from the story in part two, since it is entirely dependent on their being intrigued by Raven as a character and his minor adventures that only, very slowly, begin to reveal some of the mysteries of the world.  In that way, it is a little bit like Laurus, a historical fiction novel following the life of its titular protagonist without obeying the structure of some larger plot.

With part two finished, I’m moving onto part three, which will be the last part and the end of the novel, and which I will hopefully have finished no later than April.  After that, I’ll turn the book over to my writing group and test readers for feedback, and then it will be time for revisions.  Ideally, I’ll have revisions done by the end of the year, but we’ll see – I’ve never revised a full-length novel before, especially not in the detail and deliberativeness that I intend to apply to Impressions.  We’ll do another of these reflection posts when I finish the last part.  For now, I better get back to writing.