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Beyond the Mountain has now been read and returned with feedback by 3 beta readers. One of them is related to me, and pretty easy to please as far as books go, so her comments were more encouraging. The other two betas’ comments were less encouraging. Not that the readers were discouraging. But as I realized the problems my book has, I of course am very discouraged. There are large sections where little interesting happens. I can condense these parts, but it will throw the pacing off, not to mention making the novel much shorter. To counteract the condensing, I’ll need to add/expand other sections. That’s the part that has me staring at the screen doing nothing. This week I’ve been trying to back up the beginning—which means writing a new scene. I know what I want to happen in this scene, yet words don’t come. In 6 days I managed 1,000 words. Yesterday I managed another 800 words, by purposefully making them garbage. For example: “Just write something,” Yania said to the author, her voice echoing in the silence. “I must congratulate that Talin warrior for winning a difficult fight,” said Tohoem, who apparently was also there. It’s better than no words at all. I’ll have something to revise later rather than a blank screen. But I can’t make my brain switch back to first draft mode. I don’t know if it’s because working 3 years on this book makes me want it to be finished already, or if 5 drafts has made the current story too set in my head. I just know that once I have a whole manuscript, when I have to go add something, words don’t come.
And I’m going to have to add scenes, conflict, and who knows what else, throughout the whole thing. I’ve cried many times over this in the past 2 days. People advise to set the story aside for a while, but I haven’t worked on in 6 months. I’ve sent chapters to betas and looked at their feedback, and I’ve mentally brainstormed things to change/add, but I haven’t written anything or done any work on it until this week. I’d say 6 months counts as “a while.” I’ve tried before to do an editorial map, listing each scene’s goal, motivation, conflict, and disaster. But for most of the scenes these items are blank, or repeats of the previous scene’s goal and conflict. For a few months now, I’ve considered starting over with a new outline and rewriting the whole thing. Obviously this scares me even more than a mere revision. But it seems better to start over and do it right than to keep tweaking something that’s so lacking. I haven’t found much online about rewriting from scratch. Most of the search results use “rewrite” to mean “revise”. So I don’t know what I’ll do. I know the last 3 years haven’t been a waste, because I’ve learned a lot about myself and about writing that’s helped me write my second book. But still, I can’t help feeling like starting over means all the work I’ve done on Beyond the Mountain was for nothing. In my last post (3 days ago) I said BTM was getting closer to publishable-ness. Well fast forward to now, and it seems it will never be ready. The further I get, the more I realize its flaws. The more I write the more I wonder if I’m cut out to be an author. Writing is hard. A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people, according to Thomas Mann. But why is it so hard for me to flesh something out? To create new scenes? Why does adding words to a manuscript freeze my brain? Why can I know what happens and still stare at a blank screen?
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National Novel Writing Month is in November. The goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I've never participated, but I did my own Novel Writing Month in September. I drafted my book from start to finish in 53,456 words in 30 days. I later went back through and added a few details and fleshed out skimpy scenes, and counted that as still the first draft, so in the end the draft was about 60,000. Decent for a first draft. My target for the book is about 80,000. (It has no title yet. The placeholder title is Simi.)
It helped that I outlined the book in August. I wouldn't succeed as a pantser. I wouldn't come up with anything decent. When I wrote Beyond the Mountain I knew the whole story beforehand, but didn't know what I was doing, and pantsed my way through it. The pantsed parts weren't so great. For Simi, I outlined as much as I could beforehand. I highly recommend Janice Hardy's Outlining Your Novel. She has you brainstorm a lot of aspects of your story, and the exercises have you write a lot down so you can see where you have gaps. (I also tried Libbie Hawker's Take Off Your Pants. It seemed okay for writers who already have a pretty good idea of their plot, but it doesn't take you through any brainstorming. I'll give it one more try on my next book.) It also helped that I was on a time constraint. For Beyond the Mountain, I researched as I wrote, and it took me about 8 months to write the first draft. For Simi I wrote first, and now I need to do a bit of research to fact check and add setting details. I hope doing it this way won't take as long. Rather than researching everything and seeing what I can fit into the book, I'll be researching only the things I need to know. Now comes revisions. There are a lot of books and websites dedicated to plot, structure, character arcs, writing fast, letting your first draft be sloppy, theme, and writing style. But I haven't seen many on revision. Revision for me usually means staring at the screen and knowing what my problem is, but not knowing how to fix it. And without a time constraint (why is there no NaNoRevMo?) it's easy to procastinate. Fortunately Simi had a pretty clean first draft, so that's a step forward already. I'm getting closer to publishable-ness with Beyond the Mountain as well. I've had one round of beta readers, and I know where it needs work. Now to figure out what to do about that. |
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