When I published the first of my posts detailing my revision process, I forewarned you all not to expect scheduled updates. It turns out I was right to, because the second stage of my process, the Planning Stage, took much longer than I’d originally anticipated.
What does the Planning Stage involve, you may ask? If the Preparation Stage was all about identifying the weak points in my manuscript, the focus of the Planning Stage was–you guessed it–coming up with a plan to fix all of those weak points. One of the most frustrating things about writing is how different both drafting and revision can look from story to story, but I devoted most of my planning energy for this story to two things: character arcs and plot.
This is probably the most ambitious novel I’ve attempted to date; it features a lot of messy, evolving character arcs and character relationship arcs, and it also has two different plots woven together that make up the main thrust of the story. And in spite of my efforts to pull those elements together in the first draft, both my character/character relationship arcs and the plot more or less fell apart in the last third of the book. My intention was to fix these things one at a time, starting first with the characters and moving on to the plot, but I wound up working on them concurrently and switching between issues whenever I got stuck on trying to fix one of them.
What did fixing them look like?
First, it looked like re-reading my entire manuscript again and making notes on which details that were pertinent to the two main plots appeared in which chapters. I created a Word document for the sake of having everything in one place, which I then broke down by chapter. Once I’d gone back through the whole book, I read through the document I’d created and left notes as track changes for myself about which details needed to be re-arranged, expanded, or cut altogether. Then, I created a brand new document specifically for those two interwoven plot lines and began moving the plot information into that, re-ordering and fleshing out details as necessary.
This took WEEKS.
Part of that is because my plot needed more work than I thought. I mentioned in the last of these posts that my current manuscript is a YA thriller, which means the pacing needs to be as tight and fast as I can reasonably make it. I am not a naturally tight, fast sort of writer, so I spent a lot of time cutting down the inevitable info dumps I’d included at the beginning, increasing the tension by dialing up the stakes/the seriousness of the events where appropriate and making sure that the first third of the book had its fair share of action, and generally coming up with ways to work in the information I needed as concisely as possible.
The other reason for the amount of time this took is that I completely dropped the ball on my ending. I thought I’d set everything up so that the pieces would perfectly fall into place, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only did I have to re-do the ending and a lot of the plot points that led to it, I also had to come up with multiple new solutions when I realized that my original solutions wouldn’t work.
(Side note: The Writing Excuses podcast had a great episode a couple of years ago about writing and problem-solving for characters who are smarter than you, and I experienced that firsthand here.)
While I was working on fixing my plot, I was also working on fixing my protagonist’s character arc and the arcs of her relationships with the most prominent secondary characters in the story and trying to figure out how those arcs would intertwine with the plot. I watched this interview and used this six stage plot structure chart as guidelines, and I got some valuable advice from Kate Brauning, who heads the Breakthrough Writers Boot Camp community that I belong to.
Still, coming up with the fixes took as much time with a notebook and pen, tossing possible solutions down on paper, teasing them out, backpedaling and changing directions and exploring new possibilities, as they did craft and story resources. Your mileage may vary, but for me, brainstorming by hand tends to unlock a whole other piece of my creative mind than simply sitting down with my computer does.
I solved all those problems eventually though, with a lot of hard work and a lot more patience. And if my solutions aren’t as strong as they could be just yet, they are–at last–strong enough for me to move on to the last stage of my revision process, which I’ll be posting about next week.
Stay tuned!
How do you come up with solutions for story issues? Do you aim to fix most of the story issues before you revise, or work through them as you go? Leave me a comment and let me know!