This weekend I started revising The 13th Prime again. It’s only gone through one major revision since the first draft was done, and the first draft was actually completed in twelve days. (Yes, the first draft was 70,000 words long, so it was a complete novel in less than two weeks.) In any case, one of the scenes I read through was a dream that one of the main characters had that would serve as a foreshadowing of upcoming events. However, this time through I noticed something in the dream section that I had written in the first draft but which I had not intended to link up later in the story but which (once I found it) obviously needed to be!
This sort of thing actually happened a lot when I wrote Public Transit too. For the roughly six people who’ve read that book, I should point out that about the only intentional metaphorical connection that I had from the first draft through to the end was the use of the name “Sam” as a girl (i.e., Samantha and Sami) and the rest of it just came together as I developed the characters. When I read through the second and third drafts of it, I discovered many “happy coincidences” that were perfect for linking together to solidify the story’s meaning. In fact, many of these coincidences occurred spontaneously without my having to edit a thing.
That didn’t quite happen in The 13th Prime. The link that I discovered did require me to write in another event in one scene, as well as references to it in three other scenes later in the novel. Additionally, The 13th Prime contains far more intentional links from the start than Public Transit did, since it’s a completely different flavor. Public Transit was a satirical social commentary, and therefore relied more on taking everyday life to the extreme both in a work environment and a school environment. The rules of that book were simply to have everything Steve touched turn to ash while everything Justin touched turned to gold. The book then unfolded simply from that.
The 13th Prime, on the other hand, deals with a recurring “curse”, numerology, and history repeating itself in a small town. As a result, much more care and effort had to go into it to set up several connections from the beginning. Still, it’s nice to find the spontaneous ones too. It’s even nice to find the “hooks” for a possible link that I put in the first draft without realizing it and which, during revisions, get threaded back into the end of the plot.
And the amazing thing is, in the end product, I would wager that it is impossible for anyone else to differentiate between the intentional links and the happy coincidences that are sprinkled throughout. Such is the nature of writing.
