When I Almost Gave Up Novel Writing

I just got accepted into Odyssey’s Getting the Big Picture: The Key to Revising Your Novel, which is a huge milestone in the journey for book Miasma.  You see, because of Miasma, I thought about giving up novel writing and going back to just short stories.

When I broke up with my cowriter, it was messy and I was very angry.  But I realized one thing: I needed to get another book started.  That became Miasma.  I wrote the entire story in about 30 days.  Then started revising it right on the screen.

Yet, there were a couple of nagging problems.  These problems were why I had agreed to cowrite in first place, and unfortunately, cowriting didn’t fix them:

1. The books ran too short, as in unpublishably too short.
2. I couldn’t get subplots into the story.

So I cast about for solutions.  But how-to books are written for common problems, and these was clearly rare problems.  I posted to message boards, and this was typical of the response:

“Just add a romance!”

Uh, guys, I couldn’t get the subplots into the story.  How would adding a romance be any different?  It was discouraging because there was nothing out there.  I finally decided that subplots weren’t going to happen.  So I did every workaround I could think of to get the word count up.

The Details Monster attacks!

Enter The Details Monster.

A little short on a scene?  Add more details.

I did not know I was bad with details.  I was a big picture thinker, but twelve years in the army had left me overcompensating on the details.  What I didn’t realize was that I couldn’t tell when I had gone to far.

I finally got the story up to 80K.  Barely.  I sent it out the agents, got the rejections, though I was scared to death of the prospect of getting published.  I wasn’t sure what I would do if I got published and had a year deadline and ran into more problems.

One agent was kind enough to give me comments.  When I read them, I realized that the subplot problem was really affecting the story, and that I’d gone too far on the details.

So I restarted the story from scratch and used mind maps to help me cut back on the bigger details.  I decided to only use three of the bigger details on any subject and that forced me to pick the best of what I had.  One of those was on what kind of magic the main character had.  I also decided to let the lowest level of details go because it was too hard trying to manage the Details Monster.

But that subplot problem was still there.  Maddeningly, I could see how it was influencing the story and creating other problems, and yet, I did not know what causing it.  If I couldn’t figure that out, my novels were dead in the water.

At the point, I wondered if I was ever going to be able to produce a publishable novel, and if it was worth my time beating myself over trying to solve the problems.

For whatever reason, I started looking on the internet one more time in the hopes of finding a clue, and I ran across Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel.  There’s a lot of truth it in it.  I had been line editing rather than revising, which was keeping me from seeing the story.  I signed up and spent two months pulling out my hair.  I was going through pages and pages and pages and pages of details.  There was so much I could not find the story.

I also found myself beating around the edges of the subplot problem.  Only now it also involved theme.  Class members told me that theme and subplot were there, and that I must just not be seeing them.

Finally on lesson ten, the source of the problem revealed itself to me.  I was walking through one of the steps and it suddenly hit me that I’d started the story way late.  Every writing book assumes that writers need to chop off the first 50 pages, not that the writer is starting too late.  I’d literally started in the middle.

It explained a lot.  I’d been seeing setup in  weird places, even at the end.  Because the story started in the wrong place, setup had to force its way into the story, and it was forcing out theme and subplots.

Or so I thought … my journey to the land of subplots and details was only beginning.

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Have you ever had a time when you just wanted to give up because the problem seemed so insurmountable?  Tell me below!

 

When Things Look Really Bad: Overcoming a Major Writing Obstacle

When I read Bill Blankschaen’s post on moving forward when you hit a wall on Mike Hyatt’s blog, it reminded me of when I crashed into one with my writing.  Maybe you’ve run into a problem which seemed impossible to solve — mine sure did!

I’d spent years trying to solve it — subplots did not evolve naturally for me in the story, and I believed this was causing my word count to run short.  I tried everything and came up with workaround after workaround.  But no matter what I did, the problem remained.

It was enough to make me want to give up.   Read more on Unleaded Fuel for Writers.

 

What Did I Learn This Year?

One of the great–and aggravating things about writing–is that no matter how much I learn, I always find there’s something else new to learn.  This last year is no different.  So what did I learn this last year?

1.  That I could finish a book on my own.  I’d gotten into co-writing for two books (same book, completely different rewrite) because I struggled so much with plotting the story itself.  Then we broke up.  I wrote a first draft in thirty days to prove to myself I could actually get an entire book done without a co-writer.

2. To outline.  This last year, I finally found an outline that really works for me.  I think I’ve tried every form there is, so I ended up making up one of my own.  That’s one of the major reasons why I’ve done better with plotting.  Still not perfect, but the outline has helped me keep from doing rewrites of the entire book to work my way into the story.

3. That I need to stick with writing what only I can write.  Earlier this year, I was trying to make a subplot work (the one I’ve been having so much trouble with), so I introduced a crime to the book.  I figured it would be a way to make those elements Ineeded for the story come into play.  Spectacular crash and burn.  It should have been a sign when I fought my way through the chapter showing the discovery of the body.  I like to read crime novels, but write them?  Not for me.

4.  Omniscient viewpoint.  This year, I discovered omniscient viewpoint.  All of the writing books had generally dismissed it as not being used any more and never had explained why you might want to use it.  I did a viewpoint workshop in February where I rewrote my opening in all the viewpoints and realized that my story needed to be omniscient.

What I go into the new year learning:

1.  Taking advantage of everything in the story.  If an unnamed waitress walks into the book for one scene, I’m reminding myself to think about what else I can do with her.  At the moment, said waitress is going to tattle to the tabloids about something she didn’t hear (no, that’s not a typo; she just made something up).

2. Subplots.  I still have a lot of problems with this one, but each effort I make chipping away at it gets me close to possible solutions. 

3.  The sense of smell.    Earlier this year, I did a workshop on description that I had a really hard time with.  Two reasons:  How I do description and inflexibility on the kinds of scenes we were writing using all the senses.  I tend to spread my description over more than a few pages.  I also had a problem with describing characters and senses like smell in the middle of an action scene (that was the inflexibility part) where the choices were things like fighting and extreme sports.  But since then, I’ve run into a book which used the sense of smell throughout (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) and did a different workshop where smell was approached differently, and I’m thinking about ways to use it more.  Not in the middle of an action scene, though.