by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m finally beginning to get some sense of things with this second draft. It’s a real struggle to keep the first act down to a manageable size. At the moment, it’s flucuating back and forth between ~40 and ~50 scenes, which is just way, way too much.
One possible take on what my heroine might look like.
If I could get it down to ~30 scenes, I would feel very content. But, alas, it looks like to tell the story I want to tell, I’m going to hover at ~40 scenes. This reminds me that I need a second creative track. I need another novel I could potentially shop around as my first (sold) novel should it become clear that by blowing past the sweetspot of ~100,000 words that I’ve sort of “priced myself out of being able to be sold.”
I think writing a novel that’s too damn long is a problem a lot of first time novelists face for some reason. It’s easy to write long, hard to write tight. There is a reason why The Great Gatsby is very short relative to some modern tomes.
Anyway, the issue is I’ve established stakes and continue to flesh out my characters. My male romantic lead is now a really great guy in the sense that he saves my heroine in her time of need. That, in a sense, is that character’s “save the cat” moment.
I’m now working on the third chapter. This chapter is different because I have the detris of various other attempts at second draft to work with, though I have come to believe that I actually write faster when I start from scratch. Sometimes, it’s a lot more easier to just think up an entirely new scene than it is to root around in a bad scene that you’ve edited and re-edited over several months.
But I have to admit that sometimes I grow jaded and tired of re-writing a scene completely, so I decide to use what I’ve already written as the basis of a new scene, rather than starting from scratch.
One thing I’m a little uneasy about is the amount of spicy scenes I have in the first act. And, yet, they do move the plot along. But it all boils down to not only do I have no idea what I’m doing — I’m doing it all in a vacuum, too.
So, lulz?
