I’ve finally decided that my November writing project this year will be going full steam on editing my first novel, with the hope being that I have a third draft done, if not by the end of November, by the end of the year. This is a fairly ambitious project; the second draft text sits at roughly 68,000 words and I am painfully close to the third draft revision being a complete rewrite. As with all big, painful projects, I’m trying to make this more manageable by breaking it into chunks. This starts today; in the week (ish) leading up to November I’m starting my journey by writing out the plot summaries of my novel in its five sections as well as in total. The very first step on this journey is, as the title may imply, a book report.

I didn’t write many book reports in elementary or middle school; the practice to me is more tied to papers for high school English class that coincided with me understanding that English teachers are humans and identifying what they are looking for in your paper is more important than understanding or even reading the book. That said, the paper where I most felt like I played my teacher like a fiddle was also on a book I was really surprised by enjoying (Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann), so maybe my teacher did win in the end. Anyways. The purpose of my book report today is less to prove I read and understand a book, but more to prove I know where my writing has come up short and what about this draft needs to be changed.

This story is becoming timely, which sucks because I wrote the first draft in 2009 and the world is arguably full of the same shit that it was back then. With a working title ‘Fratricide’, the novel follows one Scott Stiles as he navigates his post-graduate year trying to recalibrate his expectations for employment as a co-op at his college’s student life office. Alongside slightly older and equally lost student life employee Lance Deckard, Scott helps Lance pursue an investigation of serial sexual assaults perpetrated by one of the fraternities on campus while using the position as an excuse to keep on hanging out at his own fraternity, which importantly does not perpetrate any assaults. At the same time he engages in romantic dalliances with two of his school friends, Grace and Melissa, and throughout the whole thing quickly discovers that whatever a path to adulthood looks like among all the navel-gazing and arrested development, he isn’t on it.

It’s mostly a bildungsroman, little bit of a romance, little bit of a conspiracy thriller, and right now, structured like crap. My partner got permission to go through the second draft with a red pen and came back with a few consistent notes. One is that she doesn’t like time jumps or any paragraphs where things just happen, which while a fair stylistic peeve is ultimately just a stylistic peeve and one not shared by many, many published authors I enjoy. The others, though, are more pressing. On the simple side, my dialogue attributions are too few, making dialogue confusing. Fair enough. On the complex side…I introduced at least two of the more interesting characters in this story like two thirds of the way through it. That is a problem, though it does have at least an interesting root cause.

I began writing the second draft of this story in 2016, feared I wasn’t improving over the first draft, put it down, then picked it up again in 2019 and began slowly but surely picking away at it and finishing the draft in early 2023. This means that some of the characters I thought to write came in in 2022…years after I had started writing. It’s not ideal, it needs to change.

There’s another big thing in the story that needs to change, and that has to do with the title. Not the working title itself, I still like it and it’s too early to worry about that anyway. More what it represents. I chose the working title while I was writing the first draft as the first draft more specifically centered around a murder, hence the name ‘Fratricide’. There is still a murder in the second draft, but it’s wedged in almost to satisfy the baggage from the working title, and that’s no good. As much as there is still plenty going on in the story, I want to elevate the murder back to its rightful place in the narrative.

In short:

• Make your dialogue better
• Put characters that showed up two-thirds of the way through in the beginning
• More murder

Easy, right? I mean, maybe. Let’s take a look at that book report.

The story takes place over a hypothetical fall semester at serial-numbers-filed-off Carnegie Mellon University, and is divided into five sections named after a typical fraternity’s fall recruitment calendar. Yes, this is a fraternity story at its core, and that’s what it needs to be. If anything, it’s a story about how “good guys” in Greek Life observe, almost regularly, the rot within the Greek system, and deem themselves helpless to do anything about it beyond make sure that they’re taking out their own trash. It’s biographical for multiple reasons. For one, the core fraternity in the story, Gamma Sigma Rho, is heavily based on the AEPi chapter I pledged and was a member of all through college. This bystander syndrome of watching 1-2 other fraternity chapters a year kicked off campus for hazing, dirty rushing, drug dealing, destruction of property…it was almost the circle of life. Then, while I was in grad school, only slightly older than Scott is in this story, the CMU chapter of Beta Theta Pi was kicked off campus for perpetrating a sexual assault that I basically based the incident in the story off of. Except, you know, the old Mark Twain axiom about ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ comes into play because what that chapter did was both wilder and a whole lot stupider than I think you could get away with in a story like this. So I write, because I don’t know what else to do, and bystander syndrome is a constant theme. Sure, Scott is mostly a bystander to the rot of Greek Life, even when ostensibly a school employee. He’s also a bystander to the vagaries of his own life, and as it turns out, one extra semester isn’t enough time to figure out what the fuck you’re doing. The irony to that story is that one semester is exactly how long I took to figure out what the fuck I was doing, but my constant nagging doubts about so much of what I did in 2010 is perhaps why this story demands to be finished.

Anyways. As I mentioned, there are five sections: Orientation, Rush, Pledging, Initiation, and Brotherhood. By time periods Initiation is the shortest, taking place over roughly one week, and Pledging is the longest (except for one asterisk), happening over roughly one month. The asterisk is Brotherhood, while it is roughly ten days long the conclusion to the section (and the story) involves a three month time jump.

Orientation introduces Scott, Lance, and the other characters in the week before classes start. At CMU, orientation is a time where fraternities are allowed to host introductory events, most of which just amount to impromptu cookouts on their front porches. I suppose now is a good time to note that CMU, unlike many college campuses, does not allow independent ‘frat houses’, the “houses” that do exist are owned by the university and leased to fraternities. This means that the ‘Greek Quad’ is on campus and that Student Life is able to exert a somewhat larger amount of control over Greek Life than at many other colleges. This is an important note for the whole story, perhaps important enough that I need to put it in the exposition. Anyways. The section opens at a Gamma Sigma Rho (from here on out referred to as Gamma Sig) house meeting where Scott is trying to address his brothers as a staff member, to mixed results. This house meeting would be happening on the Sunday of move-in day, so after freshmen are on campus but before Greeks are allowed to do anything about it. All the other introductions in this section, of the Gamma Sig brothers and of Scott’s friends/love interests Grace and Melissa happen in a number of interludes leading up to an orientation event, the Greek Quad barbecue. This was (maybe still is) a real orientation event, where the sanctioned fraternities and sororities host a cookout on the Greek Quad and get to mingle with freshmen, the one official pre-rush recruitment event. The barbecue is also our first introduction of the other fraternity that gets focus in the story, Sigma Upsilon Tau (SUT from here on out). We are introduced to Colin, Grace’s boyfriend, SUT social chair, and guy who is highly susceptible to peer pressure. Grace gets in a fight with Colin after she discovers that he is, in his role as social chair, bribing freshman and sophomore girls to come to SUT rush events. This of course ties into Scott’s secondary role at work; someone has stumbled upon disturbing evidence of chicanery at one of the fraternities, but refuses to come forward because they’ve received death threats from brothers at that fraternity.

Rush sees Scott and Lance get deeper into the bad behavior on the Greek Quad. Grace has dumped Colin, who in a fit of pique dumps a bunch of explicit photos she shared during their relationship onto the SUT filespace. This gets Colin in trouble with the university and he loses his social chair position at SUT (though this happens right at the beginning of the next section in the current draft). Scott and Lance discover that the person who found the other evidence of SUT’s wrongdoing on the university webspace was a Gamma Sig. This person, Eric, is both a friend of Scott’s and Melissa’s current boyfriend. Of course in the process of this Scott finds out Eric has been keeping the whole thing a secret from Melissa, who dumps him once she finds out he had been lying to her all summer. In learning about this, though, Scott and Lance are able to discover that the accusations of ill behavior have to do with a tradition happening during the particularly heavy party weekend of mid-semester break. SUT, in addition to throwing one of the three mainstay parties of the weekend, also has a tradition where they try to ensure that all of their pledges lose their virginity before initiation. This may sound gross, but I regret to inform you that that sort of tradition is completely real.

Pledging mostly focuses on the leadup to the mid-semester parties. A lot of this is the continuing escalating tension between Scott and both Melissa and Grace, which culminates with Melissa sleeping with Scott as a sort-of rebound after the first party. The entire next day slows down and is drawn out, as Scott both processes what he’s done and as he and Lance prepare for the party SUT is throwing where everything is supposed to go down. At that party, one of the SUT brothers slips one of Grace’s sorority sisters GHB, but Scott and Grace catch wind of what’s happening. Lance shows up to bust the party while Scott, Grace, and Grace’s sorority sister Elise escape out a back door borrowing Lance’s car. The section ends with Lance and Scott sharing a meal, processing what has happened, and receiving the news that SUT has had their charter revoked.

In Initiation, Lance is fired from his student life job, and he and Scott pick up the pieces and figure out what they’re going to do next. We also hear again from Colin, who had given Lance some of the evidence that led to the events of the previous section. While Scott and Lance are out of town getting some R&R with their fraternity brothers, tensions at the now-dismantling SUT are boiling over. Everything comes to a head when Colin is attacked by one of his brothers in a brutal confrontation that results in a fatal head injury.

In Brotherhood, Scott literally misses Gamma Sig initiation to drive Grace to Colin’s funeral in New Jersey. Once back in Pittsburgh, he and Lance begin planning their next moves. Lance has met someone: Alice, a university employee, had crossed their paths earlier in the story and now she and Lance are dating. Scott, meanwhile, has decided that even if he is no closer to knowing what to do with his life, he needs to get out of Pittsburgh. He ends up saying his goodbyes to Grace and Melissa, leaving most things unresolved and leaving feelings hurt. After finally leaving the city, we fast forward three months to Scott leaving on a cross-country bike tour. Grace comes and meets him at the start, reminding him that he still has friends and he can still keep in touch, supposing he wants to.

The obvious thing I feel like I need to do is build a stronger throughline to what’s going on at SUT during the story, and part of this is elevating Colin’s murder. My plan now is to have him disappear earlier in the story, and replace the point in the story (in the fourth section, mind) where the murder occurs with the point where they find out what actually happened, be that through discovering his body, discovering evidence of an SUT conspiracy…whatever it ends up being. The important thing is that more time is spent on Colin, his brothers, and their actions, and that those actions tie back into the broader story.

The other major change beyond that one involves a number of supporting characters. I mentioned Scott’s friend Eric, who is introduced early on in the second draft. But the two of them are rounded out quite effectively by John, Scott’s little brother in the fraternity, Jake, sophomore and highly enthusiastic new brother, and Josh, the token pledge and wide-eyed newbie. John and Josh were the characters I screwed up by introducing way too late, and they do deserve more screen time. Also of note and not discussed nearly enough are two of the SUT brothers, Billy and Ollie. Ollie is the president of SUT, a seemingly reasonable guy who takes a lot of the messed up traditions of his house for granted. Billy, on the other hand, completely embraces him, and just in case you weren’t sure if he’s a bad person he’s also Colin’s killer. Both of these characters are very interesting but receive close to no screen time, something I think I can resolve both broadly and also through the resolution to the upper issue, Colin’s murder.

Fratricide is intended to be a messy story about fraternities, a story of their worst crimes and excesses told from the perspective of characters who very pointedly have fraternities painted in the best possible light due to their own experiences. It is my experience, one where I grapple with something that can be both formative and an incredible growth opportunity while also being corrupt, misogynist, and a long-time source of humiliation and recrimination. Of course, it’s also told from the perspective of characters for whom choosing to pledge is a decision long behind them, and the decisions they’re facing in the future care little for whether they wore Greek letters across their chest, or which.

I do hope I do justice to this story. Even writing out this summary helped me see a bit where things were flabby, or confusing. I think I’m going to need to write out a somewhat more detailed plot summary than I thought initially, just to make sure I cover all the threads. It’s one of those situations where what may seem complicated to others may in fact be the simplest way forward for me. In case it wasn’t obvious…yes, I’m going to build a spreadsheet.

This coming Sunday is November 1st, so I don’t have that much time to lose. I am planning on writing this plot overview spreadsheet this week, and then starting on Sunday I’ll go through and rewrite scenes. The first section is the oldest and therefore needs the most work, so as I keep refining my plot spreadsheet and going through structure, I’ll also be pushing through the first section and just doing straight-up rewrite. As the month wears on hopefully I’ll have a more robust structure, as well as maybe salvage a bit more of my writing (especially in the last section). I will be dedicating this blog to my editing progress for the next four weeks; we’ll see if I want to make some more-than-weekly interstitial posts but I’m not committing to that yet. For now, let’s see if I can finish that plot outline and be ready to start cranking come next Sunday. I’m ready. I think.