Commit to the detail

I've been continuing with my rewrite of Snowbird this week, and finding out how shallow my previous edit made the book.  Then I realised the book had always been shallow in a lot of respects.

And one of my weaknesses is to focus on a story with tunnel vision.  Often I don't look to the side enough to take in the details and richness of the world I'm writing about.  For an SF writer this is a laziness that can't be ignored.  So much of the story is the world.

And especially so in Snowbird.  That world is totally artificial.  Most of the action takes place on Darius Orbital Shipyard, a huge structure in geostationary orbit around the planet Cathal.  And I had to create every aspect of that world, from scratch.  This novel is around twenty years old, and my first notes are just a list of which organisations were at the shipyard.  But there's nothing like sending a character for a walk through your world to show you how much you don't know about it.

And it's in the use of well-placed unique details that settings come alive.  So what was the name of that restaurant my heroine Jian dined at?  I hadn't given it a name.  What was the decor?  What type of food did it serve?  Again, I didn't know.  But these are key pieces of information for us to help us to decide whether we want to eat at that place, and Jian needed to know them too.

It's almost like my twenty-year-younger self was afraid to commit to the vision.  Her descriptions were so tentative.  And how long does it take for an Autoshuttle pod to travel from Central ring to Deep Space ring?  I had no idea.   And yet my character does that several times in the story,

I'd also failed to put in enough of Jian's emotional responses to things.  She's been dreaming of creating a sentient starship since the age of twelve.  Yet when it happens she takes it so calmly.  She  doesn't show her excitement at what she's created, or her concern over all the things she hasn't thought about.  She should be feeling joy, perhaps a little fear at this unknown quantity, and some worry about how the ship will fare in a world hostile to her sentience,

But there are many of those details I didn't commit to first time round.  They're things I'm tackling on this rewrite.  But now I have another problem.  The whole story is told from Jian's viewpoint at present, but she's just an observer for some scenes.  I need another rewrite to make the book multi-viewpoint before I feel that the details are  rich enough.  Will I ever finish it?