What do you do after working on a novel for five years and you feel that it is lacking sufficient details and a cohesive, directional plot? Do you throw away years of editing and failed attempts to piece a contradicting and jagged mass together? If you said yes, so did I!
I spent a good portion of my summer break editing and working on multiple projects. However, one project that I had wanted to make tremendous progress on was my novel The Factory. I had started this novel freshman year of high school and finished it before the year ended. When I had first thought it up, my ideas for the story and where it would go ended up being completely different to what my finished product was. I had to learn to let go of my personal attachment to the characters I chose to kill off. However, the next time I edited the book, I killed off another character and changed one character's personality so that the story became significantly more twisted than it had been before. No matter how many times I edited, I loved it. My story...my characters...I couldn't imagine my life without that world I had created. As a result, I want this to be the first book that gets published.
After this year at college, I was pumped and ready to make what I had hoped would be the second to last round of edits and perfect this story. That is not the case. Halfway through my edits, I lost all motivation. There seemed to be some structural problem permeating throughout the plot that seemed too deep to fix with shallow edits. I tried taking out old, useless plot points and stitching up what holes those left behind. I then found out that, while those plot points may not have been important to the story, they had distracted me from how much was lacking in my story. With these points gone, the stark inefficiency of my plot hit me like a pillow to the face. At first, it seemed like it could be easily fixed and so the blow was soft but then it started to sting a little later. The problem with my storyline started with points I had made in the beginning, the inability to come back to earlier points later on, and attempting to wrap up the story with a hasty ending that added nothing to the overall plot. In addition, I failed on many occasions to show the thought process of the main character in the way I wanted to. I also made one of the greatest twists in my story too transparent to be effective in eliciting a surprised response from a reader.
It felt like a hopeless cause. I was beginning to wonder if I had to completely drop the story and hope that another one of my ideas would become my first published novel. However, when I moved on to work on rewriting my second novel, (I felt it lacked too many things to just simply go through rounds and rounds of editing) I realized that there was a way that I could fix the Factory. I decided to keep the last draft as a reference point but I am no longer editing it. Instead, I opened up a blank document and decided to rewrite it. I can fix the plot, add in more details, and work on the main character's development and thought process. I started this yesterday and so, I am not sure how it is working so far. All I know is that, with the story being told in the present tense and in the first person perspective, it will have its own challenges. I just hope that they will be easier to tackle than the ones in the other book were.
I hope you are all doing well this summer. I'll write again soon!
