Dry Well Blues
Yesterday was weird. No querying. No writing. No reading. Strange. Back in the saddle today thanks to an early start, though.
Polishing the Well
Started to make plans for Endgame for tonight with the kids, but things went a bit sideways with their homework. We’ll see what the afternoon brings. Either way, it’s Friday and my wife and I have begun the final season of Lost. Hooray!
Well Chat
Misplaced Asphalt
Structural Doubt is like your gut check on how you’ve built your story. It is your internal sense of rightness and wrongness within your story. This is that voice in your head telling you that something is off. It could be flat characters, scenes or chapters out of order, pacing issues. Your story is right, but how it’s composed isn’t quite there.
This was my Draft 5 edit. When I contracted my editor for Draft 5, I sent it to her KNOWING something was wrong with my manuscript. Fortunately, she got back to me with the first issue immediately before even starting to read it: it was too darn long by half/double. The first thing she said was to cut my word count in half.
My jaw dropped. After I got over my shock, I really thought about what she said. I went back to my manuscript and started looking at it from a high level. I jotted down the chapters and their word counts, looked at the word counts per Eighth, and started looking for fat to trim. What I found was a deeper, structural issue. My story was right, but it was a bit out of order and back loaded with important story set pieces.
So I set out to fix it. I started at a high level with the Eighths and immediately realized that a couple of them completely lacked the punch they deserved. Really, the impact was all out of whack for about half of them. Some of the scenes which were quite big and powerful were at story beats that should not have been as impactful. What is now my Midpoint was split between the action piece at the First Pinch and the plot piece at the Midpoint. Too much at one and not enough at the other. So I sat down and looked at what I considered the big moments and started rearranging where they landed in the story. Next thing I knew, the story progression made much more sense.
The other thing that jumped out at me was a meaningless Hook. Authors will tell you all the time that the hardest things in writing a book are the beginning and the middle. Endings are easy for me. Those come to me first and I work backward from there. Plus, I set endings up as shining Moments of Awesome. But beginnings are rough. It isn’t so bad for a sequel; you have a world set up already so you don’t have to do as much world building and character introduction. But for Book One, I think I went through four or five completely different openings. I’m more sure about this one than any of the others, but it still nags at me.
So how do you deal with that sinking feeling of something being off? Take a step back. If you can keep writing, fine, but I recommend taking a few days or a week away from your manuscript. Let the ideas and scenes you know about tumble around in your head, but don’t write a word. Then sit down and look at things from a high level. On paper. Word processor closed. Map out what you intend to happen in your story. What are the biggest scenes? Where should they ideally be placed? How do you rearrange the rest around it? How strong is your Hook? How strong is your Climax? How poignant is your Midpoint? Answer these questions and a lot of other things can work themselves out.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG