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Re-Writing My First Book


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#1 Dalton.T.R

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Posted 11 March 2019 - 03:42 AM

So, I don't really comment here that often anymore. I check in every once in a while to see if there's anything interesting going on but have stopped commenting regularly on this site for quite some time. That being said, this is one of the only sites I'm a somewhat well-ish known member on that actually has a section dedicated to writers like myself. 

 

Back in 2010-2011 when Naruto was still going and hadn't delivered it's preposterous ending I was in the process of writing my first fanfiction, which was my primary introduction to writing. I had written for school assignments and other such things in the past, but I only discovered I had a great joy for writing when I was writing something I wanted to write myself and didn't have to worry about being graded on it. The fanfiction was horribly written, even by my standards back in the day, but it was basically a story about a highly elite assassin coming from a distant land to recruit Team 7 for an army they were building. The fanfiction is still on fanfiction.net for those interested, but aside from it being poorly written, it did lay the foundation for me to begin something on my own.

 

During the final days of my sophomore year in high school, I spent most of my time rushing through my homework and spending the rest of the day writing my fanfiction. I spent endless hours looking up pictures of dinosaurs and mysterious places such as Skull Island from the 2005 King Kong movie. Once Summer Vacation rolled around I was free to write as much as I wanted and ended up writing over 100 pages on Microsoft Word for this Naruto Fanfiction.

 

Later on, I was able to lay down the groundworks for something else. I suddenly got the idea of why worry about other people's work when I can write my own? Thus, my Chris Lynheart series was born. I started writing it as an early Junior in high school and ended up publishing almost an exact year later. However, in my beginning days, I didn't know a lot about the writing world and just threw things together when I thought up a cool idea. Some have even said that I accidentally "stole" the opening from Naruto because of how similar both openings are. This issue has been recently addressed in a new republishing of the book, but that version is not out yet. 

 

Like a lot of writers, I get my inspiration from anime. And though Naruto, for me, ended with the Pein Ark seemingly a lifetime ago, it still has a large influence on me. This will be seen when my Mages of the North series comes out. Every character has their own similarities in certain ways, but because I've become more experienced over my years of writing, I know how to better differentiate Kishimoto's characters from my own.

 

This was something I didn't really have when I first started writing Chris Lynheart, and it really shows. I'll show an example here.

 

Here is a link to the book you can use to read the first couple of chapters: https://www.amazon.c...uct_top?ie=UTF8

 

This is a scene from book 2

 

Granted there's been a ten-year time skip and Chris has spent those ten years with the most infamous group of assassins the world has ever known, but does that feel like the same character at all? I'd be very amazed if you said yes. 

 

I guess you could say I just didn't really know what I wanted with my main character when I first started writing, which I suppose is fair enough. I was very young at the time and didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I remember telling myself I wanted Chris to be a just a righteous leader like Naruto. But then, as I got older and started looking to the second book, I realized that was impossible. Due to the dark nature of the characters, he would be with for the next ten years, the best possible outcome would be a character similar to Darth Vader. Ironically, I wasn't even thinking of Star Wars when I wrote the scene from the second book above. It just fit Chris' character since he was now a hardened assassin and the head general of a military force that even outranked the President. 

 

So why go back now after all this time? Well, for one, it's to save my own a** from something I should have been smart enough to see coming when I first started writing but didn't even think about it. Then, there are all the plot holes that need to be readdressed or just taken out of the series as a whole. Also, there's new lore regarding the first book. Chris was no longer the only experiment but was one of four. Chris had death sealed inside him...take a guess as to what the other three were. And the final reason is...believe it or not, I want to redo the romance story. 

 

For those who were major fans of NaruSaku as we once all were on this site, Chris and Jessica have a very similar relationship. She doesn't start off hating him because she's new to his school. Instead, she's the first person to ever offer Chris some sort of friendship. In the original work, I jumped the gun for them way too quickly, which is what I'm aiming to change. I want to focus more on Chris' back story and let the reader truly feel the pain he's suffering through. This will allow Jessica to be the breath of fresh air she was always intended to be for both Chris and the readers.

 

Here's chapter one of the re-written version of the book

 

In just the first chapter alone, you get a true sense of the pain, the hurt and the sheer hatred Chris has for those around him. And until Jessica enters the story, it only gets worse. 

 

Once this is done, Chris and Jessica's relationship, just by their own character natures, might become the closest thing to a couple that resembles what NS could and should have been. 


Edited by Dalton.T.R, 11 March 2019 - 03:43 AM.


#2 tricksie

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Posted 14 March 2019 - 04:15 PM

Yeah, rewrites are hell on authors. Horrible while they're going on...but once you've had some time to step away, you realize you could have changed a lot more. And that leads into the next rewrite. It's like once you've started you can't stop. But the up side is you can see how much you've changed, how much the story and characters and plot has changed, and most importantly, you can see where things were going wrong. Plot holes, mischaracterizations, time inconsistencies...all of that stuff really stands out after the dust settles.

 

I like your Chris character, he seems gritty and tough, but not bad/evil. And yeah, I get the echoes of anime in it. The setting the characters, they feel like things you could see unfolding in a manga or anime. I like your idea of putting in more backstory. Makes a bigger buildup to the action. Keep at it!



#3 Dalton.T.R

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Posted 14 March 2019 - 06:44 PM

Yeah, rewrites are hell on authors. Horrible while they're going on...but once you've had some time to step away, you realize you could have changed a lot more. And that leads into the next rewrite. It's like once you've started you can't stop. But the up side is you can see how much you've changed, how much the story and characters and plot has changed, and most importantly, you can see where things were going wrong. Plot holes, mischaracterizations, time inconsistencies...all of that stuff really stands out after the dust settles.

 

I like your Chris character, he seems gritty and tough, but not bad/evil. And yeah, I get the echoes of anime in it. The setting the characters, they feel like things you could see unfolding in a manga or anime. I like your idea of putting in more backstory. Makes a bigger buildup to the action. Keep at it!

I'm actually pretty happy with book 2: Daughter of Forayer. Jessica was always a slightly more detailed character since she's actually the oldest of my characters. 

 

Chris is not necessarily evil, but I wouldn't call him a good guy either. He does plenty of bad stuff later on but based on his past and the people who trained him, he was never going to be a "nice" character.  






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