Fighting the Shadows

Funny thing about writing a book — at least if you’re neurotic enough (and I am that neurotic): you never really know if it’s DONE. The best you can hope for is that it’s done enough.

Last week, right around now, I was exulting about having completed the “final” draft of Merry-Go-Round. I certainly didn’t have quotation marks around that word.

What a difference a week makes…

Merry-Go-Round”s plot unfolds from the points of view of four or five major characters. In general, each chapter shows events in the eyes of a single major character. There are exceptions: chapters in which more than one major character has a role; chapters in which no major character at all appears. (Just a couple of those, which function as “bridges.”)

I’d already gone through two complete drafts when it suddenly hit me, back in March:

You idiot. You’ve read the entire book twice, in effect. What you HAVEN’T done is validated all the individual story arcs…

The problem, in other words, was that I hadn’t really paid much attention to each character’s discrete story line: hadn’t confirmed (for one thing) that the way they spoke was consistent, from Chapter 1 through the end; hadn’t confirmed (for another) that while remaining “the same person” from start to finish, each character had changed in at least some subtle way by the end. They’d all experienced BIG events, after all. Could they really be completely unchanged by those events? Of course not.

So I disassembled the whole book, using my word processor‘s master document/sub-document feature to create a half-dozen “mini-books,” one for each main character and one for the other chapters, in which no main player took part. And then I revised each of those mini-books, a couple of times.

What I ended up with, in other words, was a manuscript in which each chapter had been revised twice (for the two full drafts) and then three-four times more (for each mini-book, counting the chapters in which more than one “star” figured).

That’s what I had finished last week.

This morning, I was preparing to query some agents — some of whom require that the query include the first few pages of the book. So I opened up that chapter (actually a prologue), and made the mistake of re-reading it — or had the good sense to do so.

Egad. How could I possibly have used that as an opening sentence? And the first couple paragraphs in general? And…? and…? and…?

Sigh. At this point there’s really nothing to do except draw a biiiiiig breath, and then look — hard — at the total effect I want to achieve, vs. what’s actually on the page.

(I think I know what needs to be done but I’m going to hate it: switching a later chapter up front, in place of Chapter 1, which would then — in modified form — become a Chapter-2 flashback. And so on. But gad…)

Pray for me as I return to the jungle.