by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
One of my big concerns of late about this novel has been that it’s just going to be too fucking long. I’m an unknown, untested first time novelist and, in general, any novel that I might try to pitch really needs to be in the general 100,000 word sweetspot.
Anymore than that and it just physically costs more to print the novel and, as such, the likelihood that an agent will be interested in the first place decreases significantly.
As it so often the case with such the bigger decisions I’ve made with this project, something occurred to me out of the blue that caused me to change a pretty fundimental element of the story. What happened was, when I added a longish second chapter that dealt with my heroine going on a self-destructive bender I had pushed the discovery of a body that gets the story going so late in the first act that the act itself had ballooned to ~50 scenes.
But something occurred to me. With just a little bit of structural change, I could turn this problem on its head. Instead of counting the body’s discovery as the novel’s inciting incident, I now count it as the thing that pushes my heroine into the “special world” of the second act.
This is different than Gone Girl, where the “abduction” happens in the second chapter and more like The Girl Who Played With Fire, where the murder takes place a whopping 70 scenes in!
Anyway, the only issue with this new set up is the first part of the second act, which is the “juicy” part of the story typically used in the blurb to sell the novel now isn’t as spicy as I’d like. But it’s still interesting. And I’m not writing it yet, so there’s a possibility that once I’m in the thick of writing that part of the novel that either I’ll grow comfortable with what I have or I’ll figure out a way to make that portion of the novel more obviously the “fun and games” that people expect.
But I’m feeling really hopefully, at least at the moment.
