Writing workshops inspire me and fill me with new ways of thinking. They also leave me with a lot of critique comments to wrestle with. For the novel WIP, I often put comments in a file for later, instead of revising now. However, I’ve been ignoring that recently because of the flood of comments from the Advanced SpecFic workshop this fall.

For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a revision to a chapter and I’m finally done (first draft-ish). Basically, I took a 160-word flashback inserted in the final scene of the chapter and blew it up to 1800 words of narrative in the middle of the chapter.

I had a note from one of my writing teachers that, while that flashback would work in a short story, in a longer narrative it might be better to expand it. In addition, the middle part of the chapter, which now contains the expanded flashback, had some problems. Reviewers (from Advanced SpecFic) felt that the tone of the middle section wasn’t right and there wasn’t sufficient urgency in the pacing. I re-wrote the middle section, changing it from an adult’s POV to a teenager’s POV. This added more teenage angst and anxiousness.

The question came up a lot in Advanced SpecFic about the cost of doing magic and the potential danger of failing (in a magical spell, for example). I tried to weave those ideas into the expanded scene, which was about learning to brew a magical potion. This also amps up the tension as the POV character asks what can go wrong and worries about the consequences of making the potion.