I just last night sent off my most recent revision of The Mirable Chalice to my editor, my agent, and several generous readers.

That schlumping sound is me collapsing into a puddle of relief.

Something I’ve been learning to recognize in myself, as a writer, is that feeling I get when something just isn’t right. There have been times when I’ve suspected I was coming down with something, only to realize no, it’s just my body reacting to the fact that something in my book is broken.

It’s a useful instinct, even if it can be uncomfortable. For example, when I was working on Fortune’s Folly (coming out this year! Wow! It’s amazing to be able to finally say that!) I had this feeling that something wasn’t quite right with the ending. I didn’t know what was wrong, mind you, but I had this niggling not-right feeling about it. When I was revising for my editor, I was working on it, trying to improve the pacing and to simplify it. I trimmed a bunch, smoothed the rough edges. I had a completed draft, ready to go. But it wasn’t right. For a while I just banged my head on the wall (figuratively). Finally, I realized what the problem was: my main character, who I like to think of as proactive and protaggy elsewhere in the book, just sort of let things happen to her at the end. She wasn’t a complete wet noodle, but she wasn’t driving the plot, the plot was driving her. With that epiphany, I suddenly had a whole new chapter unfold in my mind, one where my main character could take charge and drive the plot. When I finished that new ending I knew it was better. Maybe not perfect (the books are never as perfect on paper as in my initial dreams) but right.

Anyway, I had a similar situation crop up with this most recent revision of The Mirable Chalice. There was a certain pivotal scene that just felt off. I think I revised it about four times in the last month, changing the order of events, trying out different emotional tones. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t right. When I finally realized what was holding me back I felt somewhat chagrined, because it basically boiled down to two things I should already know. What was wrong was that plot was driving characters, rather than the reverse. And to fix it I needed to implement the oft-quoted advice: Murder your darlings. I had been so busy trying to preserve what was there, reordering scenes and cutting them up and putting them back together again, that I hadn’t been able to see how to actually fix the underlying problem.

When I finally came to my senses I made a copy of the document, chopped out everything that connected to the scene, put it in a separate document, and started from scratch. I typed in a mini-outline of the new scene, then pasted in the parts that I could keep from the old version, and finally went through and wrote all the new bits. And now the weird uncomfortable feeling in my stomach is gone! Whew! Not that it won’t need more revision, but at least, for now, it feels “right”.

So, starting tomorrow it’s back to drafting my brand-new project, which excites me tremendously. The only question now is, do I re-read the first 20K, or just plunge in where I left off?

Tags: revision