Revision Catharsis
I’m having revision catharsis. I don’t know if that’s a thing in the real world but after a year of struggling to edit my novel I feel like I’m finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, or in my case, the sparkle of sun on the water (I do live in the winter-sun-starved Pacific Northwest). Once again I feel like the book is a living, breathing thing which is both scary and exciting.
While I’m not really a “rules” person, I do understand that guidelines can help us find their own paths. After doing a lot of reading on story structure, I understood why I was having such a hard time editing. With my Reader cap on, I knew that the story was wandering. Sure, lots of exciting things were happening to the characters but my brain was yawning because the major story milestones were missing or were massively delayed in my book.
There are a ton of methodologies out there for how to plan (or replan) a novel and I used the information I was learning from a number of these to create a storyboarding tool for myself. Using that tool, I filled in the major milestones for my book. Not what actually happened in Draft 2, but what I think should happen in Draft 3.
Happily, going back to my story, I saw that I had already written most of these milestones without realizing that’s what they were. Because I’m working in Scrivener, it was relatively easy to duplicate my second draft and start dragging my scenes around. The end result? I chopped two sections of the story that just didn’t need to be there and it no longer feels like the whole thing is wandering aimlessly.
My next step will be to read the whole thing comprehensively because I know there are now references in Chapter one to a character who isn’t introduced until Chapter five, and I’ll need to add some connective tissue to make the thing work, but I’m happy really happy with the progress so far and the story feels cleaner and neater too. Even better, I now feel like I know what the path forward toward finishing this book is.
My hatchet job was fueled by many beverages, some alone time, and a gorgeous location. I’m excited to do the next read-through and see where I can make further improvements. Have you cut major storylines out of a book? How did it go?