Reworking Things
Elise Matheson (aka Lioness) just had an interesting post on her Patreon about having to go back and rework a piece of jewelry because of an unexpected problem with some of the included beads. (By the way, if you don’t know either Elise’s jewelry or her Patreon, I recommend both highly! I love the monthly list of title/prompts.) It appeared in my feed just as I was realizing that I had to go back and change some things in the working draft of Fallen, and it was reassuring to be reminded that other people’s work doesn’t always proceed in a smooth and linear fashion.
Not that I should need reminding! For years, I’d write about 127 pages of a ms., with the writing getting slower and slower the further I got, until those last four or five pages would take a week or more. Then I’d take a break, look back over what I’d done, and realize what I needed to change to the structure of the story to make it come properly into shape. It was always a structural problem, too, one little bit of framing that had to be trued up. Recently, though, I’ve been finding those structural problems earlier in the process, either in the planning stages or in the sketching stage — my ur-draft, draft zero, where I sketch out a bunch of the major scenes so that I can get a feel for the story. That’s mostly experience, I think. I’ve gotten better at putting plots together, and that’s paid off.
But Fallen… I’m not just 127 pages into the ms., I’m four-fifths finished. This is not the point at which I expected to spot a better way to structure the climax, or a major plot point that needed to be completely reshaped to make it more effective. In fact, I’m so close to the end that I’m going to try to finish the ms. before I go back to do the rewrites. That means proceeding as though I’d already made the changes, which is not the way I usually work. I would side-eye myself if I could.
On the other hand, it’s a better idea, and it’s going to be a better book for the changes. But it was nice to see that other people do the same thing now and then.
