Based on some helpful comments from my critique group (one person said my writing style and my protagonist were superior, condescending, and too snarky) I decided to do a fourth revision of my current novel.
First I decided to change the title. The old title ASH, OAK, AND IRON was topical but evoked iron men and wooden ship, rather than elves and druids. So I finally surrendered and renamed it The THREE-FOLD DEATH. This just sounds scarier and more evocative to me.
My wife, by the way, disagrees strongly with my critique group. She liked my snarky writing style. The book is first person POV, and the main protagonist is snarky, but I sided with my critique group and kept the protag snarky, but the writing style less so.
So... where was I? Oh yea. Somebody stated that my protag was too unflappable. He's seventeen. He gets stabbed, shot, cursed, and people say mean things to him. And when somebody asked me his motivation for helping the cute elf girl (co-protag), my response was, um, he wants to shag her? Yeah, works for me, but other people might find him a bit shallow. :)
So I tried to shoe-horn in some motivation for him (other than wanting to get some sweet elf love). I added a new chapter two, modified chapters three through six and... it just didn't work. I spent days trying to fix things to no avail.
Then I woke up one morning with the solution to my problem. Enter THE SLASHER (AKA me). I was in love with my early chapters. There was some (IMHO) quality description and exposition, some good dialog and my ego was fully invested into these chapters. But on this morning I woke up knowing that I had to re-outline the novel and throw away significant early portions.
My outline flew together magically in just a few hours. I saved off the old chapters and did heavy edits on them, throwing some away altogether. I got lucky. I ended up rewriting the first nine chapters. Once I hit chapter ten, my old scenes worked and I ended up making minor changes throughout the rest of the work--a matter of a few hours work.
As a fairly new author (this is my second full length novel), I learned a few valuable lessons during this effort. So, lessons:
- Sometimes for the good of the work, beautiful scenes and awesome dialog have to be tossed. I found myself trying to save my creations, but I eventually asked myself why I was refusing to let them die. The answer turned out to be ego. Once I realized that fact, I was able to cut them loose. Sounds obvious? Sure. Except when it's your scenes and clever words being tossed.
- There comes a point (maybe) when you're working revision 1.752 and there are still MINOR problems with plot and scenes, but you're sick to death of rewrites (damn it!) Take a few days or a week off and then come back and fix the problems. You won't be happy with the final product if you don't. I personally just can't submit a novel with known plot holes or problems.
- Some people may be able to just lay down 70k words in a stream of conscious orgasm, but I have to lay out my scenes, and then lay out the timeline for each scene, and then, and only then, can I write my scenes.
Ah well, that's just me. :)
