by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m taking a deep, deep breath and rewriting scenes in the second act which are pretty good and stable….but I think I can do better since my storytelling abilities have improved since I wrote them a few years ago.
Meanwhile, there are three structural problems that are weighing on my mind as I do this. One is, the first act is a little long and — maybe? — I could lop off the beginning and start it later AND there are some scenes later in the first act that could probably be condensed.
Then, there is the problem of the beginning of the second act. It’s really interesting copy and it not only flows really well, but gets us where we need to go. And YET, given I don’t want this novel to be 200,000 words, I may have to figure out a way to condense or lop of some events simply to make the novel shorter.
I am well aware of what an anomaly Stieg Larsson’s success was, given how long his novels are — especially for a first time novelist — and so that is always in the back of my mind. But I’m not going to take any dramatic measures until I know exactly how long the whole thing is.
And that’s going to be a while — I want to go through the whole novel, rewrite what I have to rewrite then put it all together to see how many scenes it is. If it’s way over 100,000 words, then the condensing and lopping will commence.
The only reason why I suspect this version of the novel ay be a little longer than previous versions is I’m using AI to improve my scene summaries and, as such, the scenes are probably going to be more fleshed out — and so longer.
I think tonight I’m going to read carefully several scenes, write new scene summaries for them and then tomorrow sit down and rewrite the scenes. I just can’t dilly-dally forever. I still really want to start querying this novel no later than September 1st.
I know if I don’t start about then, I will probably have to punt things into early next year when everyone comes back from Seychelles where they partied like a rock star over the winter holidays.
