I've said often in these blog posts that I'm working on the rewrites to Ichor. That's... perhaps not quite as true as I may have made it out to be. I've reread the manuscript, and I've been doing some tweaking (like the changes to the first chapter I mentioned a few days ago), but haven't really started intensively rewriting it yet. Nor do I plan to before doing one more re-read, during which I intend to carefully tabulate the characters and timeline for reference when I do get around to the rewrites. (The crew of a ship makes up the entire cast, with one exception (a scholar who has paid for passage on the ship), and I want to make sure I'm consistent about the crew members' ranks and positions, who's on which shift, et cetera.) Even that second re-reading I haven't embarked on yet, because I have another project I want to finish first.
But while I haven't technically done much actual rewriting yet, Ichor has been prominently on my mind lately, and I've thought of things I want to incorporate in the rewrites. I mentioned in a previous post my thoughts about the protagonist's arc, and how I can highlight it further. Just now it's occurred to me that there's something else I can bring more to the fore during the rewrites: an underlying theme of guilt.
I didn't, when I started the novel, set out to have it be about guilt. And, well, maybe saying it's "about guilt" is going a little too far. But guilt is present as an underlying theme. (Heck, one important character's name comes from a Sanskrit word for guilt, though I don't expect many readers to pick up on that.) At the risk of a minor spoiler, guilt, in the end, turns out to have been responsible for the formation of the main villain. And there's a bit of foreshadowing about that. There are a few references to guilt—both of the gods, and of the mortals who hunt them—earlier in the novel. And—although this wasn't consciously intended to reinforce that theme, and I didn't actually think of the connection until just now—the arc of one secondary character is all about guilt. He's tempted to do something terrible, and feels guilty about even considering it... but then does go through with it anyway, and feels guilty about it afterward; when he's finally caught and forced to confess, the endless rationalizations he rattles off are just dripping with guilt. So, yes, guilt's already there in the story as something of a through-line.
But I can do more with it.
Oh, I don't plan on taking this too far and beating the reader over the head with it. But there are other places this theme could work into the story naturally. I'm thinking in particular of the protagonist. He has, at the outset of the novel, a very hazy memory of events from before he arrived on the ship; he's basically amnesiac. He remembers that he was a thief, but he doesn't remember exactly what he did, or what he stole.
There's plenty of opportunity for guilt there. Maybe he doesn't like the fact that he was a thief; maybe he's worried about what he stole or what he did. This could allow some interesting character exploration, and could work very well with later events in the story, such as when he asks another character to try to help him unlock his missing memories (maybe wanting to know the extent of his crimes is part of his motivation), or when, well into the novel, he finally tries to use his thieving abilities (maybe guilt-born reluctance is the reason he never tried to use them until then, and is something he has to overcome when he does finally use them then). And near the end of the novel when it turns out that he's apparently—well, heh, don't want to spoil too much here. But anyway, this could also lend another dimension to the protagonist's character arc I was concerned with in my earlier post.
Ooh... and it just occurred to me as I was writing this that that could potentially work in with another minor theme touched on with the villain near the end, about being able to resist a predetermined purpose. Hmm...
(For what it's worth, these thoughts were brought on at least in part by reading this old blog post from Arthur A. Levine, linked to from this post on Miss Snark's blog. (The connection may admittedly seem tangential at best, but I promise there was a train of thought that led, however circuitously, from that post to this one.) Yes, I'm still reading my way through the archives of Miss Snark's blog (and a few other writing-oriented blogs). Is there a more profitable way I could be spending my time (like actually writing)? Eh... maybe, but there's enough good stuff there that I'm certainly not wasting time reading it. Hey, for one thing, this reading has apparently given me some ideas of ways I can improve my novel...)
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