Maggie Stiefvater dissected Chapter 15 of THE SCORPIO RACES on her blog a while back. The response was overwhelming, and the common thread was “I wish more authors would do this.”

So that clever Maggie, realizing that she knows more authors, asked a bunch of us to dissect our own chapters. So here I am, fixing to break down Chapter 1 of THE VESPERTINE for you. I’m excited to share these pages.

As you’ll soon see, my original beginning wasn’t my final beginning at all. Even though I know it sucks to delete words you’ve written, sometimes they have to die. And in my breakdown, I’ll show you why.

Throughout this entry, you can click on the pages to see larger versions.

ORIGINAL DRAFT

1) I hadn’t yet decided if it should be 1881 or 1889. Each year had its pros and cons.

2) I wanted a line that captured a gothic feel. My goal was to strike the same kind of note as “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” from du Maurier’s REBECCA. This never changed, even though you’ll see that everything else did.

3) None of this made the final draft. Even though there are a lot of pretty words in here, nothing happens. Seriously, nothing happens. This goes on for another couple of pages, and finally, August locks his sister in the attic. Amelia locked in the attic is the interesting part. So all of this had to go. See ya first page (and, in fact, first 1000 words.)

4) Which made the book open with… someone waking up from a dream. One of those rules that gets bandied about, and in general, I think it’s a good rule. In this version, it wasn’t the front of the book, so it launches a little softly here.

5) Both in the original and the final, this section was designed to introduce the rules of Amelia’s power. The description here explains her ability’s endpoint—so there’s conflict as she discovers the power during the book. When will she learn to do X? When does Y come into play?

6) If THE VESPERTINE started with Amelia all happy and showing up in Baltimore, it would have been super slow to get to the magic and conflict. By promising the reader that some BAD JUJU is going to go down, it adds anticipatory tension to the first chapters’ relative calm. Plus, I’m pre-introducing the players. Later, when the reader sees the name Zora again, she can go, oh dude, something bad happens to her, let’s find out what!

7) Demonstrating the power, but also Amelia’s mental state. She is straight up bonkers in the opening chapter, because that’s my overwhelming conception of gothic. Crazy, locked in an attic, dark secret, bloody sins… Of course, I cheat—Amelia’s not bound to the house, she gets to go out and have her season. But still.

8) The concept is fine here, but the execution is horrifying. There’s a fine line between evoking the fiction written in a particular era, and overblowing it. Historical people won’t be reading this novel—modern people will. So, yeah—I kept a lot of the concept in this paragraph, but gutted the florid prose.

9) This is one of those sentences that only makes sense in your head. Too much focus on the dress; not enough focus on the action.

10) Watch me segue! That’s all this paragraph is for, leading you from sad, mopey Amelia to Amelia, bugsucking nuts.

11) Hi, yeah, I just want you to know there’s a dude involved in the downfall, and here’s his name.

12) This was a touchstone image for me, Amelia beating on the windows. It’s too flobby here, though. The action is buried in the description.

13) That fine line again. “Truth, such and such happened” works for a Victoria-era audience, but it’s confusing for a modern one. I’ll use the construction later, but only after introducing it in dialogue to demonstrate how it works. As written here, it’s confusing.

14) I wanted to capture that sheepish feeling you get when you do something stupid and dramatic, but realize it’s stupid and dramatic. I got close here, but the final is better. It’s pared down and tight. This is flobby.

15) I know a lot of people think authors just blithely write whatever, devil may come. It’s not true though—we do think about what we’re saying to our readers. In this case, it was important for me to underscore that Amelia is not herself, and what she’s doing is dramatic and looks cool on film. But suicide isn’t funny, it’s not to be taken lightly—nor is it something that most people attempt just for the attention.

So this is a very short paragraph doing a lot of work. Amelia is self-destructive right now, but underneath it, she really doesn’t want to die. She hasn’t yet figured out that living isn’t the cowardly option. It’s a complicated emotion— I feel like I managed to flesh that out more effectively in the final version, but the core of the thought is on the page here.

16) Hey, Mistress Segue, good to see you again. Also, looking at so many of the Victorian dresses with the very heavy beading on the skirts and trains—it struck my imagination that they would drag your azz down like whoa. So even though there’s absolutely no reason for Amelia to be wearing her ballgown in this scene, she totally is. Because I thought it would be awesome to use the skirt as an anchor.

17) In this version, you’ve already met Amelia’s brother, so they get right to arguing. In my head, August is played by Burn Gorman from Torchwood. And when he plays angry, he scares the crap out of me.

18) I was trying very hard to avoid dialogue tags. I have a bad habit of describing every single thing while people talk. So this is an early effort to avoid doing that. August still emotes quite a bit here—and it also establishes what Amelia’s place in the world is right now. She can be locked in an attic, and her brother seriously considered sending her to a sanitarium. DRAMA!

19) Another segue. Also underscoring Amelia’s state of mind, and just how frazzled August is. There’s a lot of casual violence against women in actual gothic fiction (because it was endemic to the time,) and in modern gothics (because it’s endemic to our culture and the style of fiction.) So I wanted to nod at that—but also twist it a little.

In fact, an overall goal for the book was to have a gothic Heroine and a Byronic hero, but to never once have the hero mishandle the heroine. I think you can be convincingly brooding and mysterious without laying hands on somebody you love.

So in this case, August slaps her because she’s freaking out on him, but he doesn’t feel good about it. And later, when Caleb attacks her, it’s totally unacceptable violence with no romanticism to it.

20) This line does a couple of things. One, it establishes that Amelia is, ahem, rather dramatic (I mean seriously—”Just poison my breakfast!”?) but it also sneakily sets up the final frame in the story.

21) I don’t believe in EVIL for the sake of evil. Antagonists have feelings, and reasons for the things they do. August has locked his sister in the attic, and just had a screaming fight with her. He’s definitely an antagonist here— but he’s not gleefully evil.

He and Amelia have a past and a relationship that inform this particular moment. He may be doing a terrible job of it, but he’s trying to take care of his sister. (Which does not mean what he’s doing is forgivable. It’s just explicable.)

22) Still a drama queen, but also the first line where you should get the impression that she’s acting out and freaking out, but she’s also genuinely depressed.

23) This goes back to 15. I wanted August to specifically comment on her suicide attempt, to dissuade her. Even though he’s angry and acting badly, I wanted it in the chapter, on the page, the understanding that just because people are mad at you doesn’t mean they want you dead.

Then Amelia’s line is more self-destructive thinking that is directly contradicted in the next section. Lots of people think about hurting themselves or killing themselves when they’re depressed. I wanted to be able to show Amelia going from thinking about it, but subconsciously, then consciously, realizing she actually doesn’t want to die.

 

FINAL PAGES

1) As you see, I kept the first line. I just tweaked it so it fit into the new beginning.

2) In the original, this was three, four paragraphs. It still introduces the era, and the love interest, and the tone. And it does it with 25 words instead of 150.

3) Oops. Since this was a fairly substantial revision, I changed a LOT of things. However, the original was still in my head, so this error slipped through. Amelia is just waking up here, not standing up and swaying yet. Except, she totally is on the page. Oops.

4) One of my beta readers told me to put the magic on the FIRST page. She was right, so I did. This also allowed me to put “vespers” right up front– defining it, and starting to define the title, on the very first page.

5) This appears in the original draft. It’s been cleaned up a little, but it’s still doing the job it was written to do: introduce Zora, introduce tension, hint at the coming disaster.

6) This is still explaining exactly how Amelia’s power works. You know her endpoint, so you can watch her ability grow—knowing more than she does. This is much more explicit than the draft explanation. The original was still vague and hazy— mostly because I didn’t know how the powers worked yet.

7) This was three paragraphs before. Now it’s two sentences. Tight prose is readable prose.

8) You never stop wanting to edit your work. Even though this book went through a total of 3 major revisions and 2 minor revisions, copyedits, and THREE rounds of pass pages… I hate this sentence and I wish I could change it. The attic is not hopeless. Amelia is. Derp.

9) Because this is the beginning now instead of the second scene, I have to explain how Amelia got in the attic. I’m actually really pleased with this. This one line does the work of a thousand (cut) words, and I think it does it well.

10) Three paragraphs become one.

11) Two paragraphs become one. And this gets rid of the archaic, “Truth, I could…” construction from the original. This version makes sense. It’s nice and staccato.

12) This segue gets its own line. In general, I tried to break the paragraphs down—make them shorter, and create more white space. It’s exhausting to read giant walls of text. More whitespace makes reading easier. (And it makes the book feel like it reads faster.)

13) I overwrote the first version of this paragraph. I wanted the beads to be an anchor so instead of mealymouthing around it, I just said they were an anchor. Oh, simile. How I love you.

14) The description of August’s manhandling works a lot better here, fused with his introductory description.

15) The only bit of the first chapter that wasn’t completely rewritten. Smoothed out, tightened, yes. But this is fairly unchanged from the original.

16) This also changed very little. More whitespace, a little tighter. Proof that this was a pretty necessary conversation. And that I got lucky when I drafted it. :)

***

I know this is epic length, and requires a lot of clicking back and forth. But I do hope it’s useful to you- or, at least, a little bit interesting. I know I always thought I was revising when I went through and polished each line until it was shiny.

In actuality, the polishing doesn’t happen until line edits, copy edits, and pass pages. Revision- real revision- is surgery. As you can see with my pages here, a radical page-ectomy is often exactly what a book needs. Don’t be afraid to cut. Don’t be afraid to condense. Don’t be afraid of revision!