Marc Rivers, Author

My wife and I are watching the original “12 Angry Men” and we’ve had conversations about how it could be remade and with whom. I’m personally of the opinion that it needs to be updated with women in the cast because could you imagine Jane Lynch or Toni Collette matching up against Michael B. Jordan, Tramell Tillman, or Oscar Isaac in a tense, interpersonal drama? Maybe the 2020’s remake of “12 Angry Jurors” is just another example of something that’s too awesome to exist.

In other non-existent media, I haven’t made much progress on my novel lately. What I have done has been fruitful, at least in my estimation. A couple of scenes got shuffled around and some fat was trimmed while still keeping in some character moments.

As the first draft was being written, I was doing quite a bit of world-building at the same time. The more I thought of interesting details, the more I wanted to find a way to include them in the narrative. Going back and reviewing them with a (slightly) more critical eye, I can see that some of the details are just narrative bloat.

I came to the realization that I’ll always know more about my story’s setting than the reader will and I’m under no obligation to share everything I’ve thought of. For one thing, some details just aren’t actually that interesting. For another thing, unless they have an effect on the story, they become clutter or accidental red herrings.

In the original version of my novel, at the outset of the protagonist’s journey proper, a side character warns him about the hazards of the road, including “jarnmen,” who are crazy, violent, ultranationalist raiders. I removed the only mention of them from the story because it was just that: one mention. They never appear, never affect anything from the background, and honestly, they’re not even active in the same region that the protagonist’s journey goes through.

But just because I took the mention of them out of the narrative doesn’t mean they’re not still in the world. There’s a long segment in the middle that slows way down because I wanted to show off characters that revealed more about the wider world. That’s one of my “darlings” that I’ll have to “kill,” but the narrative will ultimately be better for it. So, even though the reader will ultimately not get to know Thegn Yngvar “the Old Aurochs” or the dusk elf scholar Melendrath and his attitudes toward the Eyldrmen’s preference for songs over written records, I’ll still know. I’ll know all of it.

I’ve been thinking of setting a pace of finishing a chapter every couple of weeks. That sounds approachable while still giving me a schedule with tangible goals. I’m going to start with that this week and see how well I manage it.

I’ll let you all know how I manage this new goal and how my reading goes, too. Please take care of yourselves and each other. We’ll talk again soon.

-Marc