I’ve always felt a little bit trapped in my own mind. It frustrates me endlessly that while I can flip a switch in my brain to understand any perspective, I can only view one perspective in depth at a time. Generally, since I must be at least a little biased, I let my bias be in favor of my own perspective.
I’m also a fan of character-driven stories. Even if a story is genre fiction, it’s the characters that I hone in on—their ups and downs and the way that they think and perceive and learn and grow.
What this means, in essence, is that my reading niche is a place where stories have fleshed out characters with all the little details to show me who they are and who they are becoming, but also allow for a sense of the bigger picture.
In the final stages of editing/rewriting These Lies That Live Between Us, I was watching and reading a lot (and I do mean a lot) of One Piece. In a mindset where I was finding it hard to focus on—much less enjoy—any other author’s creations, One Piece simply clicked, as it always has since I first discovered it at age ten.
I analyzed this, and recalled the way that my attitude changed with regards to TLTLBU in the many different forms that it has taken over the years.
In my first post-publication review of TLTLBU, I received a positive review (not posted publicly) that contained the following feedback:
I had a hard time trying to follow the story line in a few places because there were too many characters. Fewer side characters would help and more development of the main characters to get to know them better.
Honestly, I’m surprised I didn’t get more feedback like this. There’s a lot going on in TLTLBU, and a lot that is left unstated—merely implied, or left out of the text altogether. Notably, that Nicki’s storyline is told entirely from other characters’ POVs, with the only character used more than once being Dara—I knew that I risked alienating some of my audience by doing this.
I did it anyway because it felt right. To me, Nicki’s story is much more fun when you the reader don’t know what she knows or is planning. It’s thrilling and intriguing in a way that mounts and climaxes toward the end, in a traditional and time-tried fashion. In contrast, if I were to tell that same storyline from Nicki’s perspective, the tension would be highest when her father throws her in the tower. After that point, even though she is caught off guard a few times, things generally go her way—which is great for Nicki, but not very exciting to read if we’re in her head.
I did consider telling that whole storyline from one other person’s perspective—Manon, perhaps, or Odilon or Hervé or even Enri—but I didn’t feel that was right. Making any of these characters the primary POV for that story would have conflated their role in the story. If I did that, then in later books, when I begin to use Nicki’s POV, I would have to create an all-new storyline for the former POV character so that he or she didn’t simply fall out of the role of protagonist.
I could have done it, certainly. But What Words Have Torn Apart is, at its core, about the three sisters. If you’re wondering why, then, Alderic was permitted the role of protagonist: his role as a member of the king’s guard means that his storyline, unless he deserts, will always run parallel with the Ceryllan royal family. After the events of TLTLBU, his storyline is even more entangled with the sisters’. This is why I could comfortably make him a protagonist when needed.
There were a lot of things I could have done. I could have cut the distracting detail about how nobility doesn’t use contractions (though they occasionally do), and the common folk do use contractions (though they occasionally don’t). But I didn’t, because I like doing something that starts out feeling ever so slightly off before you realize that oh, this is just how this world is. (Although, let me say, if I’d known I was going to do an audiobook, I probably would have edited this out. It was a nightmare to try to do in voice, and will probably sound even more unnatural as I try to make it work.)
I could have avoided mentioning the inner workings of the royal council, and Nicki’s as-yet-undefined title of Shadow, until it became relevant in the third book. But I didn’t, because I prefer the world that shows you that there is something going on before it is relevant (at which point it will be explained) over the type that surprises you with new titles and roles that the characters had all along that never got mentioned until it was relevant to the story.
What I am illustrating is that all of these choices were made, knowingly and consciously, with only myself as an audience in mind. Does this sound like a terrible decision? It probably would have sounded like it, to me, at one point in the past.
But this is where I must come back to One Piece.
One Piece has a question and answer column between chapters that began in about volume 4. At some point, the author explained that he has this rule: when he writes a chapter, he rereads it and asks himself, “Would I have enjoyed this as a boy?” to which the answer must be yes. If the answer is no, he tosses it and starts again.
One Piece is remarkable in many ways, but one of the most notable is the continuity. As the story goes on, we learn more about the pasts of various protagonists as well as the world itself, answering questions that we never thought to ask. Sometimes, the set-up is hundreds of chapters before the payoff—over a decade in real world time, in some cases. Most authors writing this way would inevitably create a few plotholes that had to be dismissed by handwaving.
Yet somehow, One Piece has avoided that pitfall. It also has, for the most part, avoided repetition. (Though in recent story arcs this may be up for debate. If you feel that Dressrosa=Alabasta, Whole Cake Island Arc=Enies Lobby Arc, or Sabo=Ace, DO NOT POST IN THE COMMENTS! I’d be happy to have that discussion, but please use the contact form to avoid spoilers in the comments.)
As to how the story has managed twenty years without plotholes, and only three major claims to repetition? I believe it lies in the author’s method of making sure that the story appeals to himself.
This means that he can comfortably go back and reread his own story from time to time—no small endeavor—and still catch any details that might be relevant. Yes, he has a notoriously enormous number of notebooks filled with notes—but notes alone can’t keep you from accidental plotholes. There must be rereads, especially where histories are being inserted beneath something or someone that we readers already know.
And so—I geared my book toward myself. Not my teenage self, who I think would probably have preferred a much more clear-cut story with a clearer sense of who to root for, and a more traditional romance—but my present self.
I expect that there will be more readers out there who will take issue with the way I’ve chosen to do things. I expect to receive at least a few negative reviews that take issue with any of the issues discussed above, and/or a few others—the ease with which I kill characters and animals despite this being a YA novel, for instance.
But in creating a final draft for myself, I also inadvertently stumbled upon something that has become valuable to me as an indie author: I don’t take negative criticism personally. Because the final version of this book was written with a reader like myself in mind, I’m well aware that not everyone will like it, and I accept that. I hope that TLTLBU will find many people who enjoy and love it half as much as I do, but I understand that it won’t be so for everyone.
Since publishing my book, I’ve started taking a lot of the criticism of it a lot less personally. I acknowledge and accept it, but a reader missing what I was going for, or informing me that it was a difficult book to get into, doesn’t bother me as it once did. Ever since this last round of edits (if you want to know whether you have the final version, check chapter 39: if it was written by Stelle, then it’s the old version; if it was written by Deric, it’s the new version), I don’t fall into the well of wishing I could make changes anymore.
It is, at last, as complete as I could make it. (Though I have no doubt that there will come a day—in a month or a year or a decade—when I will idly wish I could go back and refine it.)
I believe that, in trying to fix all the little-picture problems in the details, and tailoring the book to my own preferences, I stumbled across a pre-emptive solution to a big-picture problem that I’d never noticed: as long as I’m writing first and foremost for myself, readers’ opinions—while valuable—no longer feel like judgements. They are more of an acknowledgement that some people understand and enjoy this story with me—which is delightful beyond words—and that some people don’t—which is disappointing, but not cutting. This is particularly important, I realize now, as an indie author, because when you lose confidence in yourself and your book, there’s no one there to assure you that your book really is as good as you think it is. There’s no agent or publisher whose existence alone can assure you that, at the very least, someone experienced thought your book stood out among thousands of others. There’s only you, and your own self-assurance and love for your book.
As an aside, I’d like to say that I don’t mean any writer should ignore criticism. I always aim to question myself and my assumptions, and if someone comes up with some criticism I’d never thought of, I will give it all due consideration. But at the end of the day, I find that it’s important to be critical of the criticism. No book has ever pleased everyone, and if I rewrote my manuscript to try to please every person’s criticism, it would never be finished—and I would never be happy, because I would be writing toward a non-existent sense of universal acceptance. So yes—I read and acknowledge and consider and value every reader’s criticism. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t diminish my delight in my story, or my love for this book that is my firstborn child.
Perhaps this was obvious to other writers and I’m a late arrival to the party. It was a valuable piece of growth to me all the same.
So, I’d like to announce a the start of new blog series! I’m going to start talking a little about my journey into indie authorship. I know there are a lot of blogs out there that talk about it, but I thought that perhaps my experiences and insights as someone who dove into this world headfirst, knowing nothing, might be valuable to someone out there.
I started a mailing list! Please subscribe below. You’ll only receive notifications about the thing(s) you asked for—no spam, I promise! Plus, you’ll get access to Nevena’s Silence, a prequel to TLTLBU.