My beginning is a lot in my MC's head, and I want to go less angst, more action, but I'm having trouble figuring out how. So. 17 year old female MC. Fantasy-medieval setting. We meet our MC as she is helping her father at the mill, as she is the miller's daughter. She is mostly content with her small-town life, but feels there may be more out there. She wants to know more about her deceased mother, but her father refuses to tell her. Fast forward. She finds out her mother was a war hero, that she was a member of the elite Beast Riders (soldiers that ride mythological beasts like gryphons, unicorns, pegasi, etc) and that she had magic. Now some Beast Riders have come to town and want to recruit her. But her father tells her he's been receiving warnings/threats for years to keep her away from the Riders. MC receives one herself, with a threat of violence against loved ones if she doesn't comply. Her father adamantly refuses to let her go and wants her to stay and get married, be safe. Her mother died in service to the Riders and he is afraid to lose her too. Now. MC is a bit timid, the type of person to overthink things and worry about what-ifs. So she is now in this situation where she has had a ton of new information dumped on her and has a huge decision to make. She goes back-and-forth with herself a lot, dithering. There's a whole scene where she talks about what she learned with her best friend and tries to figure out where to go from there. A big part of the story is her personal growth from indecisive and timid to strong and commanding. But I think I've sort of overdone the dithering and angsting at the beginning. How do I cut back on this while still showing that she is completely of two minds about going away? Is there any way I could make her internal struggle more external and action-y ? (lol, you know what I mean) For example, here is one short scene where she is having an internal argument with herself: ******** Kaelie paced angrily in her room, her thoughts churning like a storm-whipped sea. Marry Alistair Vastel! She’d rather take her chances with the threatening stranger. If only there could be some middle ground. She loved her father, and life in Amberfield was comfortable and familiar. But was it worth staying if she was to be forced into an awful marriage? Yet how could she go and leave her father alone? It would break his heart. What if she wasn’t brave enough to do what the Wild Roses were asking of her? What if she didn’t have the same Wild Talent as her mother? She imagined showing up at Ridersdawn ready to go into the Beast Preserve, only to be turned away at the gate, deemed unworthy. Or worse, getting inside the Beast Preserve and then getting savaged by a wild Beast because she failed to meet its standards. She shuddered. But—there was so much she didn’t know about her mother. She had begged her father to tell her about her mother nearly every day growing up. Could she really walk away from this chance to learn about her life? I didn’t even know she was raised in Esharia, she thought. What about the rest of my family on her side? Are they still alive? Do they know about me? How would Mother feel if she could see me now? Can I sense the Beasts because of my mage blood, or is it something else? She sat down on the edge of her bed, and rubbed her face with her hands. Time was ticking. The Riders wouldn’t stay in Amberfield forever. They needed an answer.
She could look out her window and see her father doing something (farm work? I'm not sure of your setting) and feel torn in her heart about leaving him. If you use the details right you could express her guilt, her anger through his actions-- also what would she really be losing by marrying the man -- her identity, her freedom? It's a little scattered and a lot of information is thrown at the reader in one shot. I'd pick the one idea you need to portray now, in this section, and go with it ... the rest can be tackled later.
Without having read these chapters, I feel like the problem isn't the pacing or word count spent on this hook and more the approach. The reader knows the facts of what is happening and can intuit how all of this might make a young woman feel. The primary emotions here are not of great interest, because they are predictable. Confusion and curiosity are very much expected. (Just like in a scene where a doctor gives your MC a bad diagnosis, you expect primarily shock and grief.) I'm more interested in the third emotion that's briefly touched on: anger. Or frustration at the very least. I think that when it comes to keeping interest while the character mulls all this over (which needs to happen for the plot to be believable) the unexpected emotions are the interesting ones. She seems angry. Explore that. This may or may not fit your writing style, but have you considered taking a step back from the emotion instead of zooming in on it? It's counter-intuitive, but try and pull away from the internal turmoil and focus on what she actually does. (She is doing her usual chores, but unlike before she frowns and sighs. She and her father usually talk during the evenings, but lately she's been retreating.) It will be shorter, more descriptive, more to the point, and readers will still understand very well how she is feeling and what is going through her mind. They don't need the tight close-up of the internal plot recap. So I'd say zoom out as much as you can while maintaining control of the POV, focus on the unexpected and describe the things she does rather than thinks or feels. How are her actions different from before she learned all of this? How has her daily routine been disrupted? Create a detailed description of the nitty-gritty of her former daily life down to the exact things she does when she first wakes up in the morning (not for the book, for yourself) and image the ways it could be disrupted by these emotions. Maybe a little surge of rebellion means she "forgets" to sweep the floor before work. Maybe she doesn't see the point in leaving food out for the birds anymore. This news has changed her life, or at least the perception of it, so show how her very literal daily life changes. Of course there's always the more traditional high fantasy option: burn down the MC's village and all its thatch roof cottages. Nothing kicks those moody bastards into gear like the charred corpses of their loved ones. EDIT for clarity
Is much of the above news, or are you telling the readers thing that they already know? I'm wondering if the replacement text has to tell us all this information and have action, or just have action. If the information is conveyed elsewhere, you could show the process of her dithering. As I start to provide examples, I see @Clementine_Danger 's post, and, yeah. Do that. And if some of the information hasn't been provided, try providing it in action. Instead of "She had begged her father to tell her about her mother nearly every day growing up" have her ask him yet again, and make it clear from their interaction that this has happened many times before. Instead of telling us she loves her father, give us that in action, maybe in the same scene--maybe he's sad when she asks him, and she finds his sadness painful. Instead of telling us about her comfortable life, show her taking pleasure in something, and maybe show someone else's envy. Or maybe the Riders just kidnap her.
I like what you guys are saying here. I will try to take a step back from her head and focus on how it affects her actions. That's what I'm missing, I believe. More focus on her actions as opposed to her thoughts. Um...so the mysterious strangers giving the warnings may or may not blow up the mill with her father in it. Which then ultimately makes her decision for her. Too cliche?
Could be cliche, could be just a trope, neither of which are the story-slaying disasters some people make them out to be. Turns out high fantasy readers have a higher tolerance for both than most. Personally I wouldn't, but I honestly wouldn't fret if that's what the style and the plot dictates. "Making the decision for her" is the salient point here. If you're uncomfortable with the trope, think of other ways to do this. I very much liked ChickenFreak's idea of having them kidnap her. The psychological implications for the plot and character conflict are delicious.
Blowing up the mill seems too blunt. If they're that ruthless, why are they waiting around? If they care how she feels about them, why kill her father and establish a hatred that she may never release? They're powerful. They want her. They can no doubt travel further and faster than her father can chase them. Why not kidnap her? Or frame her for a crime and then pay to parole her into their custody? Or in some other way take her by force? I guess I'm wondering what the emotional needs of your arc are. Do you need this to be her choice? A free choice or a coerced choice?
I try not to take a character's decisions away from them, because every time they make a choice it can rebound, raking them with guilt for making the wrong choice, or imagining life if they'd made another
Fair enough, but I do think it depends on the arc and the theme. My current WIP deals specifically with disenfranchisement and how various people react to feelings of powerlessness, so having their choices taken away from them is absolutely crucial to their arcs. But wise-ass comments aside, point absolutely taken: conflict is much more interesting when it's not something being done to the protagonist, but rather partially instigated. Still, OP described an empowerment arc, so a little helplessness and passiveness is to be expected at first. Refusal of the Call and such.
Ooh. What if the protagonist deliberately did something to attract the Riders and now immensely regrets it? Got sick of waiting for information about her mother and did...something? Say, they went on the annual market trip to the Bigger Town and she snuck off and had a word with the swordsmith?
First off, to clarify- the Riders didn't blow up the mill. There is a mysterious agent working to try to keep Kaelie away from the Riders that blows up the mill in retaliation for her talking to them (which was against his explicit order- "Stay away from the Wild Roses or someone gets it") For example- Right after the Riders enter town, MC is pulled aside by a hooded stranger and told to stay away from them. She ignores it and goes to speak with them anyway after overhearing them talking to her father about her mother. Her best friend is then minorly injured in a scuffle in the town. She gets another warning in the form of a note: You failed to obey the messenger. Next time it won’t be just a scratch. Do not contact the Wild Roses again. This is your final warning. She sneaks out in the morning, thinking no one saw her, needing to talk to the Riders one more time to make up her mind. While speaking to them, the mill blows up. So it ends up being a combination of her actions - going to speak to the Riders - and her inaction -failing to make a rapid decision, thinking she needed to speak more to the Riders in order to make one- that caused the mill explosion. But that aside, you all do have some interesting ideas. Will have to mull over the kidnapping one. Adds some interesting depth to the idea. Edited to clarify more.
Point But a refusal of the call can also mean that the protag is too afraid to make a choice. Which would also be a choice—to do nothing
I agree that some of the thoughts are things the audience would naturally assume she would feel. If you want to state them explicitly maybe try carrying on describing her throughout her day and pepper these thoughts through as different small things trigger each one rather than having them all at once as a stream of consciousness. You could also consider fleshing out some of the thoughts in her mind's eye, like the bit about her imagining being savaged by one of the beasts. You could write out that scene as she is imagining it, describe the details of what she sees and hears and smells and feels as she steps into the ring, what she imagines the beast to look like, how she falters. Basically describe a daydream.
I had a whole thing prepared about how angst and action combined is almost always better than just one or the other, but now it looks like everybody else already said it better than I was going to
