Moving Parts

As I started to dig into the second (sort of) draft, I realized pretty early on that I’d buried a lot of good conflict way down in the second half of the book. So I started moving things up and down and out and I got my first fifty pages in solid enough shape to move on.

Then I started working on next fifty pages. I kept moving scenes around and deleting stuff there, too. Now I’m getting into pages 100-150 and I’m still trying to move things around some more. But do you know what? Those chapters are kind of in an okay order. Yes, there’s still plenty of stuff to delete and expand on. The writing is still lanky, awkward, sluggish first draft writing. But, the plot, the story itself, is not so bad there.

I was nervous to rewrite a draft I’d received no feedback on. Would I really be able to find the problems on my own? But once I discovered I needed to better solidify the main conflict, I was relieved that I identified a problem and had a solution to fix it. But then I started to apply this solution to the entire book.

The rest of the book doesn’t need this particular fix. The middle has its own problems. One of them, I think, is keeping track of a few different subplots. So maybe I should focus on fixing that area instead of other problems that aren’t really there.