It’s fairly easy to take the opening of a story almost old enough to buy booze in the U.S. and declare that, through the miracle of modern storytelling, you’re going to fix it. It’s also relatively simple to explain why those changes were made, because you only have to do the barest diligence as far as helping the audience understand your choices—after all, it’s not like the beginning of a story is supposed to give you all that much context.

It’s another beast entirely to take a snippet from the middle of a piece, be it a short story or a full-length novel, and explain what you’re doing with it in a way that somebody looking over your shoulder could follow.

Einstein said (paraphrased, as far as I can tell), “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” He was talking about science, for the most part, but it applies to your stories, too. If you can’t boil your story down without getting into a multi-part epic as your summary, you either don’t know what the important beats of your story are, or you don’t trust your audience enough to put together the parts you think are important without a bunch of long-winded setup.

If your story is extremely complicated, I don’t expect your summary to be, “a group of guys travel the world to stop an angry jeweler,” or “a lot of people die for an uncomfortable chair,” but it is important that you can pare things down to a reasonable scale. I’d say you should try to limit it to about one sentence per 50k word block, but you want to be as concise as possible.

If you start your summary with, “Well, okay, so, there’s this—” you’re probably about to say too much.

Which brings us to the sample I’m presenting today. I selected this piece specifically because a large part of what I want to do on this blog moving forward is complete an entire novel, showing my process along the way, posting the completed chapters as I go, and the piece I’ve selected is the earliest (decent) version of this story. Now, a lot of things have changed, which I’ll get into later, but I selected an excerpt that I think encapsulates the deuteragonist’s vibe.

The context for this excerpt is twofold.

First, I was fifteen when I started this story, and this was the third draft, the second completed draft (90k words), which was finished sometime in 2011. I still tinkered with the idea here and there until 2013, when I gave up on it because I realized it was too YA for my tastes. The genres are post-apocalypse, zombie, horror, thriller, drama, romance. As a zombie story, it involved a needlessly complex viral infection with multiple strains which did different things. Zombie dogs were, of course, included. The book was called X: The Outbreak which is an awful title in retrospect, though the sequel being called X: Necropolis was almost worth it.

Second, this story can be summed up as a young woman with a singular force of will and a mysterious young man with impossible abilities work together to create a safe haven for survivors of the zombie apocalypse.

This excerpt is from about three quarters of the way through the first book. Our male deuteragonist with the strange abilities (resulting from his infection with a rare strain of the virus) confronts a soldier whose orders were to capture him for the purposes of vaccine development, but things went wrong and others who stood in the way were harmed.

I let him reach the marina before me, running him toward the docks. The sky was darkening, and visibility, for him at least, was getting low. There was no way for him to know which way to go, so it had been easy to scare him into stepping onto a bobbing wharf. He had nowhere to go, and he was completely aware of it. Beck turned, knife at the ready, and waited for the attack. It did not come.

“What are you waiting for, an invitation?” he growled, dropping into a fighter’s stance. “Come on, kid. I haven’t got all night.”

“Oh, I know. You’ve got about five minutes, give or take,” I replied, casually. I saw him falter, and jumped on the opportunity. “You’ve probably killed my friend Darren, you know. Drawing blood in our community calls for immediate exile. So, technically, I could just banish you and take it at your word that you’ll never return.” He started to speak, but I cut him off. “However, you and I both know that that solution is… Well, it isn’t really a solution, is it? You’ll come back with more men like you, and we’ll have a rather large problem on our hands, now won’t we?”

“So what happens now, Carridy? Huh? You don’t have the gall to kill me.”

“I’m not going to kill you.” It was then that the howling started, close to the marina. Kenneth jumped, slipped in a puddle of water, and nearly plunged into the icy cold harbor. “You’ve got blood on you, you know. And we ran right past their den. They don’t usually come out at this time of year. Too cold. But, they do get hungry, Sergeant Beck. And they can smell you.”

“They’ll tear you apart, too,” he pointed out, laughing harshly. “I think that makes up for it.”

“Actually… They won’t. You see, I can be long gone by the time they get here. And, even if I chose to stand right here, perfectly still, they wouldn’t touch me. Even if I was drenched head to toe in your blood, they would run right past me to your steaming remains. They don’t sense me the way they sense you, Sergeant Beck.” My voice became eerie, raspy, and low. “Over the past few months, I’ve learned that they don’t see me as food. None of them do. They see me as one of them. I smell of the virus, Sergeant Beck. Just. Like. Them.”

“You’re crazy, Carridy. That’s impossible.” The howling grew ever closer, steadily louder, almost metallic in the multitude of harmonic voices, and high, less dog and more thing with every passing moment.

“Oh, I might be crazy, Beck, but only because I was made to be. They changed me. As for it being impossible, well… I’m sure you’ll see for yourself.” I turned my back on him and began to walk away, but he took a wild shot at me, running at me while my back was turned. I ducked his knife and kicked his legs out from under him. He jarred his chin on the dock, and I’m sure he was seeing stars when I crouched beside his head and whispered, “Here they are now, Beck.” The click of claws on the wharf echoed, and the low growling shattered the night. “Can you hear them, coming closer?” I could smell them, the rotting stink of them, and almost couldn’t breathe through my disgust. “Can you feel them, coming to feed?”

It’s pretty dramatic, right? And there are just so many commas. I’m still not great about that, to be fair. I like commas. But I could trim the fat and slim this piece out quite a lot. There’s not much motivation for me to do it given just how completely the story will change in the newer version, to the point that the character being left to die in this sequence and the character he’s referenced as having probably killed won’t exist, but the point of this blog is to show you how you could improve something like this (which is in honesty not that bad, removed from the context of the rest of the story where you realize that every character except this military guy is between the ages of sixteen and nineteen).

So let’s start with that first paragraph. First up, I would rearrange things so that references to the docks weren’t split by the bit about the visibility lowering. I’d replace some commas with some em-dashes. Then I’d condense the docks, marina, bobbing wharf piece. I’d also get some stronger word choices in place (herding rather than running, for example).

The sky was darkening and visibility—for him, at least—was getting low. I herded him toward the docks and onto a bobbing wharf. He had nowhere to go and he knew it. He turned, knife at the ready, and waited for the attack. It did not come.

Next, the following few lines of dialogue. I don’t need to say the antagonist has dropped into a fighter’s stance because I already said he’s got his knife ready and he’s waiting to be attacked. It’s implied that he’s physically prepared. A lot of the time, colorful dialogue tags aren’t recommended. I take issue with that advice, personally, but it is absolutely true that if you overuse them or use too many in a row you’re going to take your reader out of the scene. As such, we’re going to trim that down, too.

“Come on, kid. I haven’t got all night.”

“Oh, I know. You’ve got about five minutes, give or take.” I saw him falter. “You’ve probably killed my friend Darren, you know. Drawing blood in our community calls for immediate exile. So, technically, I could just banish you and take it at your word that you’ll never return. But you and I both know that isn’t really a solution. You’ll come back with more men like you, and we’ll have a rather large problem on our hands, now won’t we?”

“So what happens now, Carridy? Huh? You don’t have the gall to kill me.”

The next chunk has a lot of the same problems. We can tidy it up by condensing, altering a few words here and there, generally improving the flow.

“I don’t have to.”

It was then that the howling started, close to the marina. It startled Kenneth; he slipped in a puddle of water and nearly plunged into the icy harbor.

“They don’t usually come out at this time of year,” I said. “Too cold. But we ran right past their den, and they do get hungry, Sergeant Beck. And they can smell you.”

“They’ll tear you apart, too,” he said. “I think that makes up for it.”

“Oh, they don’t sense me the way they sense you.” My voice became eerie, raspy, low. “Over the past few months, I’ve learned that they don’t see me as food. None of them do. I smell of the virus, Sergeant Beck. Just. Like. Them.”

And our final chunk, also with a lot of the same stylistic changes. It’s clear which parts of my writing style have evolved and which have stayed the same. It’s also clear where I’ve gotten more stylistic, which will look to some folks like I’m sort of backsliding. But the point of these exercises is as much to demonstrate corrections as it is to demonstrate purposeful changes that I, as the writer, simply like better.

“Y-you’re crazy, Carridy. That’s impossible!”

The howling grew ever closer, steadily louder, almost metallic in the multitude of harmonic vocalizations, and high, less dog and more thing with every passing moment.

“Oh, I might be crazy, Beck, but only because I was made to be. As for the impossibility, well… I’m sure you’ll see for yourself.”

I turned my back on him and he took a wild swing at me. I ducked his knife and kicked his legs out from under him. He cracked his head on the dock hard enough that I’m sure he was seeing stars as I crouched beside him to wait for the inevitable.

The click of claws on the wharf echoed, and the low growling shattered the night.

“Can you hear them coming closer?” I whispered. “Can you feel them coming to feed?”

So, with the context of the rest of the story, I was able to fix this part. But it means more knowing what the stakes of the situation are. Without context, the POV character seems like a crazy person. And, yeah, okay, a little bit. But in context, you understand this is about protecting himself and his community, which he did not struggle alone to build.

Now, when it comes to the new story involving this young man, a lot of things are different.

I’ve already sat down and obsessed over The Idea for a good, long while. I’ve also made significant alterations to the core plot. For example, it’s not a zombie virus anymore; it is, instead, a bio-weapon which caused mutations over the course of about a year. Some people were immune, some people were “regressed” into mindless beasts, and some were altered in other, less predictable ways. I’ll talk more about it in later updates when I get closer to actually working on the piece, but a critical change to this specific character is that he is still deuteragonist, but he is no longer special snowflake only immune boy to ever walk the Earth. No—he is infected, he is one of the infectees with unusual abilities. What makes him special is what these abilities allow him to do.

Next time we’ll start talking about story structure, outlining, and character work. This will all be in preparation for starting work on the novel, so that I can document as much of the process as is feasible. I’m also always open to questions, comments, and suggestions for other areas of focus.