Why and How I Created ANOTHER Blade Runner Ambient Soundscape

Okay Kyle. This is for you.

My Blade Runner Ambient Soundscape has grown more popular than I expected it to. What started off as a fun little project just for myself has (at the time of writing) 216,738 combined views/listens on YouTube and a combined watch time of 6.7 million minutes, or 111,666 hours. All of those big numbers are hard to fathom, but what's even harder for me to wrap my head around is that, since those videos were posted, I've gone from 17 subscribers to 655.

That's 638 more people who want to be notified whenever I post a new video. Reasonably, that's an oodle of people who are telling me that they love the soundscape and want me to make more. Unfortunately, I mostly use YouTube for uploading non-soundscape things like my relatively mundane and personal monthly 1 Second Everyday videos. Furthermore, I am not in any way, shape, or form, a professional sound designer, musician, or audiophile. Making soundscapes was not my true calling in life nor my passion. I just happened to have a clear idea in my head for a thing I wanted to exist that didn't exist yet, and I just happened to have the knowledge, tools, and skill set to make it myself, so I made it.

However, there's an anonymous quote that I try to live by. It goes like this:

"Whatever your talent is, don't be precious or stingy with it. Give it away to as many people as generously as you can to the point of exhaustion."

When I first heard that quote I decided that it should be my motto, but I'd never gotten a chance to put it into action. Naturally, this was my chance. Regardless of my own doubts, I needed to make another soundscape. Unlike the first one, though, this one wouldn't be for me. This one would be for everyone who subscribed or left a comment praising my work and thanking me for my effort. This one would be a gift.

This one would be tough.

Blade Runner 2049 is not the same movie as the original Blade Runner. It doesn't have the same legacy, the same tone, or even the same type of score. Whereas I created my original Blade Runner soundscape around the foundation the original movie set up – where the use of slowed-down music, ambient rain sound effects, and wind chimes came naturally from the film itself – a soundscape based on Blade Runner 2049 would essentially need to be shoehorned into the mold that the first one had set for it. I'm sure Denis Villeneuve felt exactly the same way about filming it as I did about making my soundscape from it. Yup. Exactly the same.

So I told myself what all artists should probably tell themselves before working on a sequel to a beloved work; "It will never be as good as the original. The very fact that it is a sequel diminishes its quality by taking away the spontaneity and uniqueness that is so necessary for any art to stand out. People will hate it. People may even hate me for making it. That's okay, because in the end I'll have made something that someone else might really enjoy."

With that out of the way, it was time to get to work.

This Time, Let's Start with the Art

Since I didn't want to forget how to Photoshop the album artwork because it took a while to figure out the first time around, that's the first thing I did. Aside from brainstorm, I mean, but I'll get to that later.

For obvious reasons, I wanted to use the same technique on the album art for the 2049 soundscape as I did for the first soundscape (which I'll refer to as the 2019 soundscape from here on out, since that's the year the first film takes place in, for the uneducated). While there was one pretty obvious candidate for which scene to adapt, I watched the movie again hoping to be inspired by something I hadn't thought of.

First I tried a scene that was somewhat reminiscent of the one I used for 2019:

While the result is pretty cool, I felt that it was lacking in some qualities that made the 2019 one work better. Perhaps the largest flaw was (aside from the text being nearly unreadable) that this scene isn't very iconic, so it's not easy to recognize that this is a scene from Blade Runner 2049. Realizing how important this quality was, I gave in to my initial gut idea and applied the same effects to the most iconic scene in the whole film:

I had to do some tweaking to the effect in order to make the text stand out, but in the end it was pretty obvious that this was the best scene to use. Now that that was out of the way, all I had to do was make the actual soundscape. You know, the actual hard part.

The Same but Different

Sequels are hard. Did I already say that?

Taking Kyle's request literally, I began brainstorming sound effects I could use to differentiate the 2049 soundscape from the 2019 soundscape. Since snow is unique to 2049 and is seen quite a bit in the film, the most obvious idea was to replace the sound of pouring rain with ... uh ... the sound of falling snow? Okay, fine. Because the only sound associated with falling snow is a chilly whistling wind, and that's not really as relaxing for most people to listen to, I decided that I'd make a minor concession in the uniqueness of the soundscape by keeping the rain – though I was determined to make the rain sound more like 2049 rain than 2019 rain, if possible. I figured I could do that by using the sound of a heavier downpour, pairing the rain sound with a cold wind, and alternating between different ambient sound effects layered on top of the rain such as Kyle's idea of crashing waves.

Because this project felt like a gift I was making for the fans (especially Kyle) rather than a little project for myself, I wanted to get an idea for what it was the fans actually wanted in a 2049 soundscape. To find out, I asked the r/BladeRunner community on Reddit what it was they would want in weather effects (as well as if anyone had a way to extract the 5.1 audio mix from the movie as separate files, but more on that later). Fortunately, I got replies that were both enthusiastic and clever. These ideas included heavier rain, subtle wind, snow hitting water, crashing waves at the sea wall, and the throat singing from the "Wallace" track on the soundtrack. Some folks even suggested ideas for the "sounds of the city" version, such as the clink of whiskey being poured into a glass, a dog panting, and bees buzzing like in the Las Vegas scene, or the sound of footsteps in the snow.

Fast forward to the actual creation of the soundscape, and despite all the great ideas being thrown at the wall, there was only one option that was really practical for making a sequel to the original soundscape while retaining the same relaxing qualities. I needed to stick with rain. Just rain. I tried pairing it with different cold wind sounds, but the results were either too creepy, too subtle, or too much. To make the soundscape unique, I went looking for an ambient rain track I could use that was heavier than the original while still sounding like it existed in the same setting.

To elaborate: some heavy rain soundscapes sound more like they were recorded in a jungle or from inside a car rather than in a city, and even then they might have the sounds of passing cars, leaking gutters, people talking, or too thick of rain hitting dense puddles. I needed the rain to be just right.

For a couple months I couldn't find the perfect rain, so I just used the 2019 soundscape rain as a placeholder. Fortunately, about a month ago, someone uploaded a brand new rain recording to the internet that fit my criteria just perfectly. The timing couldn't have been better.

Marking Time

Speaking of time, in the original soundscape I used the sound of faint wind chimes to mark every 10 minutes, which was meant to help those who wanted to track time keep it (such as for timed meditation) while allowing people who wanted to lose time ignore it completely, since wind chimes are featured in the movie enough to make them just another part of the experience. I wanted to do something similar for the 2049 soundscape, but I ran into the big problem that comes with doing a sequel such as this: there was no iconic sound that immediately came to me that could be used to subtly mark time in the same way as the wind chimes did. I managed to brainstorm several different ideas, all of which failed compared to the wind chimes when tested. These included:

• A Singing Bowl — this was too harsh
• Sound from beginning of "Pilot" — this was too soft
• Peter and the Wolf — this was too distracting
• BR2049 Chime (a singing bowl-like noise from the actual movie that I discovered) — this was both too low and too distracting

Much to my dismay, after testing out all of my ideas at different volumes, none of them worked quite as well as the wind chimes. I had to make yet another concession of uniqueness and keep the wind chimes.

Stretching the Score

As with the 2019 soundscape, the ambience in the 2049 soundscape comes not only from the pouring rain, but also from the sounds of the movie's score stretched out to nearly unrecognizable lengths. Personally, I love the Blade Runner 2049 score that Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch came up with, but it is very (intentionally) different from that of Vangelis' score for the original. While it fits the movie perfectly, it doesn't have the same beautiful dreamlike quality to it. It's darker, dirtier, not nearly as iconic, and doesn't stand on its own (without context) as well as the original. I knew that these differences would drastically impact the quality and tone of the new soundscape as compared to the first, and I had to come to terms with that being completely out of my control.

Still, I knew there were some profound moments of beauty in the score that would work perfectly for the soundscape. To find the right tracks, I simply listened to the soundtrack on loop and noted what songs I thought would do the job, or, in some cases, which songs would need to be edited in order to do the job (for example, I thought the second half of the track "2049" could work, but the first half was full of booming bass and eerie ambience that didn't fit what I was looking for).

I then stretched the songs out 6× using Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch and listened to those versions several times to see if any potential issues revealed themselves that way. I was especially listening for tones that might irritate others even if they seemed normal given the reference point, since my wife and I found out that we couldn't sleep to the original soundscape because there's a loud, high-pitched tone that wakes us up at around 1 hour and 50 minutes every single time – something I wish I'd noticed and corrected during its creation. This led to me eliminating tracks like "2049" because, although it contains the incredibly beautiful synth melody that sounds distinctly Blade Runner, that melody also sounds incredibly distracting when stretched out over what's meant to be a calming soundscape. 

In the end, I had to stretch out two tracks to 8× their original length in order to make it to my 3 hour goal (I chose "Rain" for its distinctly Blade Runner beauty and "Wallace" for its iconic throat singing) and I had to actually remix a small segment of "Wallace" to remove one of those distracting tones that would have kept my wife and I up at night – a blasphemous act, no matter how small the change – but in the end the stretched-out 2049 score proved fully capable of supporting the soundscape and providing the 2049 vibe it needed.

Capturing the Sounds of Los Angeles 2049

When I made the original soundscape, I was fortunate enough to have access to decades of fan-made resources, specifically the multitrack bootleg CD "Los Angeles - November 2019" By Esper Productions, which remixes the background audio from the original film to create audio vignettes of locations visited throughout. It proved incredibly valuable in the creation of my version of the soundscape with city sounds, and unfortunately there was nothing of the sort created for 2049, as the film hasn't even been out for a whole year yet.

Again, here's a case of me trying to shove a 2049 peg into a 2019-shaped hole. If I'd started out with a 2049 soundscape, I probably wouldn't even try making a city sounds version. I brainstormed all sorts of ways to get around the issue, such as including generic sound effects that are associated with the movie (such as footsteps through snow and crashing waves) and scrounging up whatever little bits of audio I could find in the movie without dialog over them to try and create some sort of ambient loop out of, neither of which was ideal.

Going back to my Reddit post that I mentioned earlier, I got a big break in the form of a user by the name of SleepyBacteria pointing me in the direction of a SoundCloud page where the sound designers for 2049 had apparently released eight whole minutes of sound effects from the movie without any dialog or score layered over it (the "BR2049 Chime" I mentioned earlier is what you hear in the beginning of this). On this eight-minute-long track alone, I knew I had a fighting chance to make my three-hour-long 2049 soundscape version with city sounds. It was discovering this resource that gave me enough confidence to actually begin developing the soundscape, and I quickly went to work breaking it up into smaller chunks (separating the scenes) so I could be more selective about what I was going to use.

My next big break came when another Redditor by the name of m0rp shared that they had gone and separated all the 5.1 audio channels from both films into individual tracks for sampling. For a few weeks prior to this I had been tinkering with the idea of trying to do this myself since my original plea to Reddit went unanswered, but I wasn't confident that I would be able to do it. Now, however, I had access to all the sounds from the movie that I could play around with myself. While some scenes were still useless to me due to dialog or score being present in every channel, this resource gave me much more freedom in designing my own samples from the movie's sound effects, which is exactly what I did.

With the separate audio channels, I was able to work around score and dialog to create new, "cleaner" ambient mixes to be used in my soundscape. The most challenging of which was the Chinatown scene (pictured above) in which I had to work around the "wub wubs" from the score as well as the dialog between K and Mariette by turning those moments down and replacing them with sounds from other areas of the same scene.

In the original 2019 soundscape with city sounds, I foolishly drag-and-dropped each city sound in manually, adjusting the volume levels multiple times for the same (repeated) sound, and had gaps in between each city sound track. For the 2049 soundscape with city sounds, I wanted the sounds of the city to never leave your ears, and I also really wanted to make work a lot easier for myself. As such, I next created my own 2049 ambience track made up of all the different city sounds that I had made so I could easily loop one track throughout the entire soundscape. I then imported that ten minute track into the overall project, adjusted the volume levels once, and then copy-and-pasted it back-to-back throughout the entire three hours. My suspicion had been correct; it was better to work smarter, not harder.

Wrapping Up

After months of work, I finally had the entire final version of the soundscape in front of me. It looked like this:

Cautiously, I exported both versions of the finished project and got to work on the final steps: listening through them on loop to make sure they work, adding notes (as lyrics), album art, and other information in iTunes, teasing the release to some Blade Runner fan groups, uploading them to Google Drive, creating the YouTube versions, and writing this blog post.

On listening to the non-city-sounds version, I was honestly a bit let down. It was too much more similar to the original 2019 soundscape compared to what I had originally imagined, and the 2049 score made it sound so much less compelling than I'd hoped.

On listening to the city sounds version, however, I was pleasantly surprised. The sounds of the city really brought the track to life in a way I hadn't anticipated. Whereas I prefer the non-city-sounds version of the 2019 soundscape to the city sounds version (and if YouTube views mean anything, so do the rest of you), I consider the version of the 2049 soundscape with city sounds to be far superior to its plain counterpart.

So here I am with one version that's not what I hoped and another that's better than I expected. You know what? After all the work I've put into it, I'm happy with that.

I hope you're happy with it too, Kyle.

Thanks again for reading! Stream them here or click one below. Download links are in the descriptions. And if you happen to like reading short stories or know someone looking for a freelance writer, please check out my true passion over at www.RyanMatejkaWrites.com.

Just the Facts:

• Three hours long
• Fades in and out for interruption-free looping
• Consistent heavy rain throughout
• Two alternating wind chimes every 10 minutes to mark time
• Several short rain variations intermixed approximately in the middle of each chime

Elongated Background Music:

[All tracks stretched with Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch]

• 00:00:24 Sapper's Tree 600% Slower
• 00:10:00 Rain 800% Slower
• 00:28:30 Wallace 800% Slower [Small Ear-Piercing Segment Removed]
• 01:11:48 Memory 600% Slower
• 01:24:50 Someone Lived This 600% Slower
• 01:41:38 That's Why We Believe 600% Slower
• 02:02:32 Her Eyes Were Green 600% Slower
• 02:38:00 All The Best Memories Are Hers 600% Slower

Intro and Outro:

• Clip of unaltered "Rain" by Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch plays at start
• "Tears In The Rain" by Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch plays at end in place of wind chimes

City Sounds Version Intro and Outro:

[Taken from Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and The Wolf]

• Begins with Joi Emanator Startup
• Ends with Joi Emanator Shutdown

Why and How I Created a Blade Runner Ambient Soundscape

There are a bunch of awesome Blade Runner ambience projects out there on the web, such as the "Blade Runner Ambience Sounds Of The City 2019" By Curtis8516 which is a 30-minute long track that uses music and effects from the movie and video game to make you feel like you're standing on a street corner in the film's version of Los Angeles in November 2019. There's also the multitrack bootleg CD "Los Angeles - November 2019" By Esper Productions which does something similar but aims to transport you to several distinct locations of the film for a total of 1 hour and 19 minutes.

Those and many others are seriously amazing works by truly dedicated lovers of the film that just go to show how much people love the atmosphere of the classic 1982 cult hit.

However, none of them really gave me what I, personally, was looking for in an ambient Blade Runner soundscape. I wanted an ambient soundscape that was a bit more calming, dreamlike, and meditative. I wanted something that reminded me of the feel of Blade Runner's city without the distracting parts of it like the sudden sound of a passing vehicle, or a loud conversation, or even the incredibly beautiful notes of the iconic soundtrack. I wanted something more subtle.

If You Want Something Done Your Way ... Do It Yourself

One day it occurred to me that it wouldn't be so difficult (or crazy, but that's debatable) to make a Blade Runner soundscape myself. I had experience with sound mixing from my teenage years of making really bad songs out of sound loops, and I had plenty of audio resources to work with.

The goal was simple – whereas other fans had made Blade Runner soundscapes that were intended to make you feel like you were standing on a street corner in Los Angeles 2019 from which you may or may not hear Vangelis' iconic score, I wanted to make something that reminded you of Blade Runner without explicitly calling it out. As I explained it to my friends; others intend to recreate the world while I intend to lull you into it.

I created a folder on my computer specifically for storing the sounds I would use, and took to the internet to download the ones I didn't already have. I downloaded a dozen different ambient rain recordings and a couple wind chimes, then copied over sound effects from the movie I already had as well as some songs from the soundtrack that played as in-world backdrop in the movie.

The final touch I needed was the synths. It was vital that I incorporated iconic sounds of the score without including the songs themselves, because I didn't want to be listening to this thing and get distracted by an iconic track I recognized. To resolve this, I took a few Vangelis tracks from the movie score and stretched them out to upwards of 30 minutes each using Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch. The result was long, moody, and dreamlike. Perfect.

Starting Small

Rather than jump in head first, I decided to experiment with a proof-of-concept soundscape track. I mixed seven minutes that included several short rain samples I had downloaded overlaid on an 800% slowed down version of "Rachel's Theme," as well as a very quiet introduction of the "Blade Runner Blues" and a brief moment of distant wind chimes. The result looked like this:

I decided to keep direct references to the movie (unaltered songs and SFX) very muted while keeping the rain and slowed down song the primary focus. Given that all the rain samples I found were so short, I also needed to experiment with which ones would give the true Blade Runner feel as well as if it was possible to transition seamlessly between different rain effects without drawing attention to this. This is where the most difficulties came in, as I had to mess around with position and volume in order to smooth out the transitions, and it was impossible to simply copy and paste a single rain track over and over since the transition from one end to the next beginning was jarring without extra effort on my end. It was obvious that I needed a longer rain track to work with for the full version whether that meant finding one someone else had recorded/mixed, or mixing my own. Otherwise, the seven minute long track was a success, and it kept me motivated to move on toward the full thing.

The Full Version

I took to YouTube and searched for different long-form ambient rain mixes, hoping to find the perfect one that either lasted at least 3 hours or could be easily looped to last that long. Fortunately, I found a 3 hour long track of gentle rain falling without any songs or thunder that fit the mood I was looking for perfectly, so I downloaded it to use myself.

Using that as the basis, I began constructing my full version. While the new three hour long rain sample I found provided a great basis for the track, I didn't want to let all the shorter samples I'd downloaded go to waste, and decided to mix them into the full version to keep it from being completely repetitive. Additionally, in order to utilize the wind chime samples I'd downloaded in a way that was a bit more practical, I decided to alternate between the two of them every 10 minutes so as to provide a sense of time passage to anyone using the track for meditation.

Next, I had to make sure I had enough of the synthesizers to last the full three hours, so I again used Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch to lengthen a few other Vangelis tracks from the soundtrack that already had a dreamlike quality to them in order to make them even longer and more dreamlike.

Lastly was the harp. I had really wanted to utilize the Gail Laughton track "Pompeii 76 A.D." in the soundscape, as it was used during a brief moment in the film in which several bicyclers are seen riding past the camera and felt ethereal. I tried placing it in between the chimes, but the repetition became too distracting and so I had to try something else. Going back to the mentality of how I used the chimes practically, and keeping in mind that I used an unaltered clip of "Blade Runner Blues" as an introduction to the soundscape, I decided to place this beautiful harp track at the very end of the soundscape in place of the final chime as a way to signal the listener that the soundscape was coming to a close and would soon fade out.

The Alternate Cut – Including Sounds of the City

Blade Runner is famous for it's seven different cuts of the film, so it seems fitting that I ended up making two cuts of the Blade Runner soundscape as well. With it finally completed, I knew that some people might prefer it with a bit of unaltered ambient noises from the movie thrown in for added immersion. Not wanting to disappoint this part of the fanbase, I decided to try it out. Using mostly a few of the tracks from the Esper Productions "Los Angeles - November 2019" bootleg, I inserted several sounds of the city to alternate repetitively throughout the three hour soundscape (keeping the tracks low and quiet to stay true to the intent of the original version) and saved that as an alternate cut. I'd say it turned out pretty good.

Designing a Cover

I'm not a very good visual artist, but when I get this far into a project I tend to go all the way, so I felt compelled to create an album cover for the soundscape that wasn't embarrassing to look at. There was no way I would be able to design something good from scratch myself, so I needed to figure out a way to make the fanciest thing possible utilizing my relatively limited skill set and resources. This led me to find inspiration in a fan-made wallpaper that I found on Reddit wherein a user wanted a high-resolution version of a screenshot from Blade Runner 2049 as their wallpaper, but disliked how the foggy nature of the image gave the impression that it was in fact blurry. To remedy this, they photoshopped the image to appear as if you were looking at it from behind a foggy, rain-soaked window. This is the result:

Not only is this a beautiful image that perfectly captures the vibe of Blade Runner, but I was fairly confident that it was an effect I could recreate myself with a little bit of guidance. I messaged the user who created that image asking for a tip on how to do it myself, and thankfully they replied shortly later with not only how they did it, but they also provided the rainy window overlay they used for me to use in my own version.

I quickly went to work applying the same effect on two iconic images from the original film, resulting in the following images:

While those made neat wallpapers, they weren't much for album covers. I decided to move forward with the second image, resizing it to the square shape of an album cover and adding text in the Blade Runner font (which I downloaded from dafont). Again, keeping my limited visual creative skill in mind, I decided that the easiest way to make the text look good would be to make it look as though it was drawn on the window itself. While this sounds complicated, it seemed far less intimidating to me at the time than picking a solid color that looked okay.

In the end, of course, the text took much longer than everything else about the cover. Using a guide I found online for making it look like someone had finger-drawn words onto a foggy window, I realized that my image was too dark in some places and too bright in others, making certain letters almost impossible to read. I needed a solution to this, and it wasn't something the guide offered. I was left to experiment in the very intimidating Photoshop software all on my own. After quite a bit of trial and error, I realized that I could make the text itself 75% transparent behind the window layer (on which the words were imprinted using some other technique I can't even remember or begin to describe) in order to even out its visibility quite a bit, so I did that.

This was an album cover I could be happy with. It looked somewhat professional and stayed true to the spirit of the movie and the soundscape I had created. The next thing I had to do was make a widescreen version of it to attach to a video version of the soundscape so that I could finally upload that to YouTube. The process of exporting the three hour high-definition video file, despite it being of a static image with music playing, took long enough that I didn't dare try it again when I realized I had made the background image blurrier than I had originally intended. I was stuck with that mistake. I've since convinced myself that it probably looks better that way. Maybe.

Sharing My Work with Everyone

My original plan for spreading this soundscape was to upload it to YouTube, which is a pretty common place for folks to post their soundscape projects, and to provide links to download the MP3 on Soundcloud. While uploading to YouTube went about as well as could be expected given the huge file size (so huge that I've since already deleted the video files to make room on my hard drive), I soon found out that non-paying members of Soundcloud could only upload about three hours of music to their account in total. Even if I hadn't had all those embarrassing songs I made when I was a teenager on there, not even only one of the two versions would work, since they were technically each just barely over three hours long.

After some trial and error with other hosting options, the compromise became clear to me: host the files on Google Drive. That was easy enough.

I was finally done and ready to share my creation with the world.

Anyway...

It was both a headache and a pleasure to make. I've listened to both versions several times myself and have enjoyed them thoroughly. Stream them here or click one below. Download links are in the descriptions.

Thanks for reading!

Just the Facts:

• Three hours long
• Fades in and out for interruption-free looping
• Consistent gentle rain throughout
• Two alternating wind chimes every 10 minutes to mark time
• Several short rain variations intermixed approximately in the middle of each chime

Elongated Background Music:

[Vangelis tracks stretched with Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch]

• 0:00:00 Rachel's Theme 800% Slower
• 0:35:10 Blade Runner Blues 600% Slower
• 1:36:15 Esper Analysis (Longing + Empty Streets) 600% Slower
• 2:35:51 Fading Away 800% Slower

Intro and Outro:

• Clip of unaltered "Blade Runner Blues" by Vangelis plays at start
• Pompeii 76 A.D./Bicycle Riders by Gail Laughton plays at end in place of wind chimes

Condensing and Combining Scenes

One of the biggest things I noticed about the first draft of my novel was that it was long. Really, really long. 93,000 words long.

At first, I thought this was fantastic. It meant that my initial fear of not being able to write a full-length novel was inaccurate. Unfortunately, I soon realized that the length of my first draft wasn't a result of my expert storytelling, but in fact it was evidence of quite the opposite. The length of my first draft was entirely due to my inability to plan ahead and combine multiple plot lines into single scenes. Basically, my novel was too long because it was dragging its feet the entire way to the finish line.

Luckily, in writing my second draft, I've found that the first draft is very useful as a thorough outline of what the later drafts should include, albeit in a totally different format. Each scene of the first draft typically had one objective, which was to get a single plot point from A to B. With the second draft, I'm finding it much easier to think ahead and put together the puzzle pieces to fill each scene with at least three simultaneous "objectives," AKA plot lines. Rather than just getting characters from one place to another, they're moving locations, slowly completing their arcs, and introducing mysteries into their pasts all at once. The result is scenes which feel more exciting and alive, even though they're technically another step removed from what a real-world moment in time typically includes.

It's yet another big step forward in both my novel and my abilities as a writer.
-Ryan

Tips for Revising the Second Draft of a Novel

Last year, I completed rough drafts of two separate novels, each of which I wrote in very different ways. One was loosely outlined, and then that outline was almost completely ignored in favor of making it up as I went along over the course of a few years. The other was extensively planned, outlined, and then written entirely in the span of a single month with only minor deviations from the original outline.

These are the first full-length novel drafts I've ever completed, hence the drastically different approaches to writing as I'm still kind of figuring out what works best for me. While it was incredibly relieving to finally finish not just one but two full-length drafts after so many years of work, this year I'm tasked with the equally difficult task known as the rewrite. As I've never done a full rewrite before (I refuse to count the time I did massive rewrites to the first story's first draft mid-way through writing it, or the fact that the second story is actually a rewrite in itself), I've found myself in personally uncharted territory yet again. Luckily, I feel like I'm already finding my groove, so here are a few tips for the revision process based on my own experiences thus far:

Tips for Writing Your Second Draft

Rule #1: Nothing is Sacred

The first and most important rule to any rewrite is thus; nothing is sacred. You've got to be prepared for constructive criticism to do away with your favorite scenes, characters, and plot lines if you want to write the best story possible. It doesn't matter if the subject in question is personally important to you unless you can make it just as important to the story and your readers, because in the end a fiction writer isn't some prestigious person to whom all else must obey, a writer is a servant to both the story and the readers.

More important to this rule is that you must understand exactly what is at the core of your story, because if anything is to be considered sacred, it must be that core idea which inspired your story in the first place. Understanding what that core idea is will be infinitely helpful if you hit a wall and become convinced that everything you've written is rubbish. It's in moments like these that you must be willing to toss away all the rubbish and go back to and rebuild an entirely new story from that core. This core can be anything from a setting or character that initially inspired you to write a story around it, or it might be an emotion or message that you want to convey to the reader.

It's Never Too Late to Outline

After finishing the draft of my heavily-outlined novel and then ignoring it for two months, I came back to what appeared to be a horrible mess of a story written by a madman with no sense of pacing, excitement, or tone. Seeing as that draft was the result of me having already discovered the core of an earlier unfinished story and crafting an entirely new plot around it, I was confident that the general outline of my story wasn't the problem, it was the supporting details. The problem was that I couldn't put my finger on exactly what the story was missing.

This is where I turned back to outlines. For days, I did nothing but research plot structures for books, plays, and movies. I refreshed my memory on Freytag's Pyramid and the Three Act Structure, then discovered the Five Act Structure and the Eight Sequences of Film. Having found the Eight Sequences the most personally helpful structure, I poured over definitions for terms like "Inciting Incident" and "First Culmination," then, to the best of my ability, I wrote out what each of the eight sequences were of that first draft. Trying to fit my novel into this structure forced me to not only see that my story wasn't as bad as I feared it was, but helped me understand my own story so much better, which in turn allowed me to see what it was missing. Suddenly, I had a clear understanding for what my main subplot was, why it felt so natural to resolve it when I had, and how to make it even stronger in the next draft.

I'm a firm believer that, while we may have a feel for how to pace a story as we're writing it, it is incredibly helpful to break it down mathematically to understand why exactly it feels good to write it that way. For example, look at the the very middle of your story and see how it relates to the ending. According to traditional structure, if your story ends on a high note there should also be a high note in at the midpoint. If the tone of your middle is a teaser for the ending, you've now got insight into why it works, and if your middle differs from your ending, then maybe that's what's been bothering you the whole time! If traditional structures don't work for your novel, it's still helpful to break down your story to its basics to understand how it moves and what isn't working.

Just Write!

Even after all the brainstorming and outlining, some of my best ideas for revisions came when I actually sat down and started rewriting. I looked at my first paragraph, hated it, tried to think of something more catchy that better prepares the reader for the type of story they're getting into, and came up with an idea that killed two birds with one stone; not only did the new idea check off all the boxes for a great introduction to the story and characters, but out of it came a new subplot that fits perfectly into the story, will help me to tie up many loose threads, and drastically improve the pacing of the exposition.

So when all else fails, just write. Try new things. If you get stuck, take the scene or character that you hate, figure out why you hate it, draw inspiration from popular scenes and characters that you love, figure out why they're awesome, and see if you can apply the essence of that same greatness to yours. Get those creative juices flowing and let them do the heavy lifting.

Listen to the Professionals

Listen, I'm no authority on this sort of thing. Not yet, anyway. But these are the things that work for me, and hopefully I've written something here that will work for you. Otherwise go ahead and research more credible writers, I promise I won't mind.

Oh, and try not to get too stressed about all of it.

-Ryan

I Figured Out How To End My Novel As I Wrote This Blog Post

I'm literally about a chapter away from ending my novel, and yet I can't decide how to end it.

Hello, and welcome to Ryan's Blog, where I rant on about my struggles to write a novel that you know nearly nothing about. Yes, this is going to be one of those posts.

Endings are tough. You have to basically wrap up all the loose strings from your novel into a really neat-looking bow. It's hard enough to wrap up the end of two ribbons into an actual bow, so this is just insane.

Actually, the ending was kind of easy for the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo; the type of plot I was writing basically allowed for only one of two possibilities, and I just had to pick the best of those two and try my best to carry it out. This, however, is a completely different monster.

And what a monster it is. As it's the first novel I've attempted to write proper (that is to say, not counting the "long story" I wrote as my first attempt at a novel - that one didn't even make it to twenty thousand words in length), it's been a very, very rough process. The overall idea stayed the same, but the details, both large and small, changed dramatically over the course of writing to the point that I felt the overwhelming need to publicly blog my promise to stop going back and changing so much. What I'm left with is a very Frankensteinian (a word I've just now coined to mean "liking to Frankenstein's monster in that it's made up of many non-matching parts to create a whole that resembles a cohesive final product, though the seams used to connect the non-matching parts are very much visible, as is the fact that those parts do not match") rough draft.

One character was shy and kept to herself, and suddenly she's bluntly honest and forward. One character was a potential love interest, and then he was a bit of a stalker, and suddenly he's just some random mutual friend. Didn't this person say they were an only child? Where did this brother come from?! That sort of thing.

But you get what kind of monster it is - I need to get back on track. The ending.

The ending, in this case, can be narrowed down by determining just what exactly the novel is about and what lessons it aims to teach both the reader and the main character. The problem is that I've spent so much time on this novel and changed it so dramatically over the years that I can't really tell for sure what it's about anymore.

I got so stressed about this three weeks ago that I attempted to write a synopsis of the novel's plot from beginning to end in hopes that simplifying it would give me clarity into what it's about and how it should end. The results of this experiment? I drafted up an ending that made about as much sense as I could figure out at the time, but, unlike the moment I thought of the novel's clever title, I just didn't feel 100% confident and certain about it.

And now, as I've just finished writing another scene, yet another ending has presented itself to me - one that I had been specifically trying to avoid for quite some time. You see, without giving anything away, I'd been working under the idea that I wanted to write a story about a girl stumbling into some very implausible situations, trying to make them work for her life, and then having a reality-check in the form of everything coming crashing down along with the realization that life just doesn't work like that; not everybody gets a happy ending because we're all just background characters in someone else's life. Jeez, that sounds like someone learned how to fly so I threw them into a pit of fire.

The thing is that the short story this novel is based on had a totally different spirit to that proposed ending. The short story was lighthearted and fun. While I tried to retain this same spirit in the novel, over time it eroded away and became more of a serious drama with only slight glimmers of the story it started as. The ending, then, became a bleak reality-check - though with a positive lesson for the main character at the end. While I still believe it's important to increase the drama as the novel goes on, I'm beginning to realize (literally, as I write this blog post) that I lost sight of what I wanted to write in the first place. I wanted to humanize an overused archetype. I wanted to make you like her.

There it is. Just as I wrote the last sentence of that paragraph, everything clicked into place. I know now how it has to end. I need the reader to be on her side. I need her to be the lovable archetype. I need to remove the story from reality and keep its feet planted firmly in the fantasy.

Wow. I'm so glad I decided to write this blog. I had no idea it would end with me knowing confidently what I want to do with the novel.

Knowing my history, I'll write another in a month or two about how the ending changed again.
-Ryan

I Edit My Stories Too Much

I'm a perfectionist. This isn't always a good trait for a writer.

I once explained in a blog post about a class assignment where we were to share a rough draft with the class that "to ease my paranoia that if nobody likes [my story] I'm a failure as an aspiring author I've recruited four of my closest friends to read it over before I submit it to class." Essentially, instead of a rough draft, I presented my class with a third draft that I'd had edited by a peer. The result was mostly positive, as I noted in my post summarizing the student responses, but I've since begun to learn of the drawbacks to this mentality of perfectionism.

This is a screenshot of the first few pages of my novel after I've taken to editing it. Using Microsoft Word's "track changes" feature, it kept track of all of my changes by coloring additions red, and marking deletions in comment bubbles on the right side of the page. Bear in mind that what little black text you see was already edited numerous times without the "track changes" feature.

The thing to keep in mind is that I haven't written the story much beyond the pages you see here. I went back and started editing the only few chapters I had written, rather than going on and just writing the rough draft. Mostly every writer I've encountered has said that you must simply get through the first draft, no matter what, before going back and editing.

Obviously I didn't feel this way. I was coming up with new ideas for scenes I'd already written, and wasn't satisfied with the characters' personalities as I had originally envisioned them. Obviously it's good that I was thinking of improvements, and it was probably okay to go back and make edits, if only to get a clearer vision for what I would write next.

The problem is that I'd gone back and edited those chapters so many times (often rewriting entire scenes), that if I had just kept on writing, I would at least have more content to show for my effort.

Let me be clear: I'm still conflicted about how I should be writing. I would absolutely love to go back and edit what I have until I feel it is perfect, but I also know that I may never be 100% satisfied, and that future, unwritten events in my novel might require me to change the beginning chapters yet again. Essentially I was setting myself up to be stuck in a never-ending cycle of edits and revisions.

In an attempt to snap myself out of it, I gave my fiancée a copy of what I've written (sans red edits) without making edits that I'd already had in mind. I forced myself to hand over my work, knowing full-well that there are specific scenes that I absolutely hate.

Hopefully she disagrees.
-Ryan