Consistency is one of my weak suits. When it comes to any habit, I tend to struggle with doing it consistently. Reading books, reading the Bible, prayer, devotionals, exercise, and, yes, even writing. That being said, my writing is important and, although I haven’t written a word in
*checks chart*
eight days, I HAVE been working on my writing itself. What non-authors don’t realize is that even when you’re not putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as it were), you’re writing. Authors are obsessed with their work. We think about it all the time, even when we’re doing other things. One of my best times to think about my work (art?) is when I’m driving. I can’t do anything else but pay attention to the road, but it isn’t a difficult task for me so my mind is freed to wander. Some of my favorite ideas have sprouted during a drive.
That is where I have been the last few days. Last week, my kids were on Spring Break and I was overloaded with work so active writing did not happen. Passive writing was another matter, though. I took my family to see I Can Only Imagine. Beyond the movie being shocking, moving, and utterly beautiful, I had a moment of clarity. At one point about halfway through the movie, Brick asks Bart, “What are you running from?” He goes on to tell Bart that he needs to deal with that and then put the pain from it into his music.
That was the moment I realized that I missed something fundamental in my story. At the Inciting Incident, Grant (my main character) has a life-altering and traumatic event. It drives him to make many decisions throughout the rest of the book and the series. The problem is that I don’t describe that pain at all throughout the story. My character doesn’t grieve. And he should. He should be crippled by it at first until…well, later. We’ll leave it at that for now.
So last night, I started to go through my story chapter by chapter at a high level. I went back to the initial notes that my editor sent me and, as any good number-cruncher would, attacked my book by the numbers. I was already aware that my “eighths” were lopsided.
Okay, the eighths.
I have read a good deal of K.M. Weiland’s literature on the art of writing. One of the biggest things i gleaned from her work on planning your novel is that good stories, whether deliberately or inherently, are divided into eighths. Each eighth is bookended by a major turning point in the story: the Hook, the Inciting Incident, the Key Event, the First Pinch Point, the Midpoint, the Second Pinch Point, the Dark Hour of the Soul, the Climax Beginning, the Climactic Moment, and the Resolution. Thus, breaking the book into pieces at these moments allowed me to conduct a fair analysis.
I found that, based on my editor’s notes, every single eighth was too long, some of them by enormous amounts. I knew I needed to cut full chapters to bring the word count down (I needed to cut up to 101,000 words!), so I started looking at that. I wrote down what Grant wanted (Need vs. Want being another element in Weiland’s work) and tied that into the major moments. Then I decided to revisit the Wants of the other POV characters to help focus their efforts.
What came out of this was that Aron’s perspective is largely unnecessary in THIS book (he is integral to certain parts of the rest of the series). Thegrador doesn’t have much to add from his own perspective either beyond the…other realms. So most of their chapters are being cut out. Rorian’s and Meibor’s chapters are being refocused along with Grant’s. Some of the major moments are being shifted or restructured. I also identified the longest ten chapters so that I know some of the most important places to trim. Some chapters will be trimmed and combined to concentrate the progression of the story.
In short, I’ve started making a plan for the sixth draft once I get my notes back from my editor.
That’s right. I’ve done all this prep work and I’m not even going to use it yet. It is a fruitless effort right now knowing that in ONE MONTH my editor is going to start her review. Once I have a holistic, outside perspective on my novel, I can fold that in with what my gut is telling me and distill out a tight, focused story that will hopefully get me an agent, a deal, and published.
That’s the dream.
For now, I’m going back to the Corona and am going to try to finish it up. That will give me something to focus on outside of The Tidestone Cycle until such time as I SHOULD return to it.
P.S. The other advantage of going through this exercise is that I will be able to better focus Book 2 down to save myself from all this drafting.
Catch y’all on the flip side.