Edit with Me: Enchantress

An introduction to the book

In retrospect, the rose was a mistake.

From the first draft of my book, that has always been the first line. Born in 2017, this book follows an enchantress who is half-sister to a prince. She enchants a rose for his birthday, and the results of her actions lead to an enchanted mirror, a ball no one remembers, and the creation of otherworldly beasts.

As you might gather from that description, the book started as something somewhere between fanfiction and original story, filling in the storyline of the enchantress from the 2017 live action version of Beauty and the Beast as, essentially, a prequel. Unlike the film Maleficent, which reframes the story of The Sleeping Beauty into something it was not without that lens, my goal from the beginning was to craft a true origin story for a character I saw as a villain, one that ties in seamlessly with its source material.

It’s grown, since then, to something much closer to original fiction. It doesn’t rely on any named character from the movie, besides taking the commonly assumed name of Adam for the prince, and using the name Agathe, the name of the beggar/enchantress in the film, in a specific way. There are characters who could be Maurice and Belle. But all the main characters, the ones that really matter, are my own.

This amalgamation of fanfiction and not makes it perfect for a series in teaching editing. The setting is familiar; the story works toward an ending most people can guess. That is the cool thing about books, though: some of them work even better when you do know the ending. We’ll get into this as we go along.

Anyway, I spent the summer of 2017 preparing my idea. The initial spark was only, “Who is that enchantress really? Why Adam? Why now?” I knew I didn’t want my enchantress to be a scorned lover (which felt too easy), and quickly decided that servant in the household didn’t give us the stakes I would need. Well, I figured, if Adam was the son of a king, but not living with him, he must be a bastard. What if his mother had a child before she became the king’s mistress? What if Adam had a half-sister?

Thus, my main character Celeste was born. I knew I wanted to build the plot points around the enchanted objects that matter in Beauty and the Beast. The mirror, of course, would make a good midpoint, since the midpoint is what James Scott Bell calls the mirror moment. I wanted a ball, and a beast, and, of course, the rose that started it all.

Going into National Novel Writing Month that November, I knew almost nothing else. To this day, it’s the closest I’ve come to pantsing a book. I handwrote much of my draft, won NaNo for the first time in the four years I’d tried it, began a revision, and…found myself stuck. I spent much of 2018 trying to figure out what I was missing, adding in scenes, deciding on new plotlines. I rewrote the second half of the book without going back to weave those threads in to the first half. I just wanted to get to “The End.”

In March 2019, I abandoned the story altogether. Too much was broken. Too many plotlines felt poorly developed. The magic made no sense. I didn’t like it. This is when I could have brought in a developmental editor to help me. I had broken pieces of a story that I knew could be something, but it wasn’t yet. But I didn’t.

Instead, I had 50,000 words from 2018 NaNo — a contemporary YA story I loved and knew how to fix — calling my name. My foray into historical fantasy, and my return to fanfiction, felt over.

But in 2021, I reread the whole thing and not only realized it was worth saving, but that I finally had ideas for how to fix it.

While most of those ideas have gotten scrapped along the way, those bullet points sparked me to keep going. In the next installment of Edit With Me, we’ll look at how this book developed in 2021 and where I’m at now. After that, we will be set to line edit.

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