The 12 Days of Liz: Day Eleven: Moving the Goal Posts

So I’m almost done cutting Act One and I’m realizing that although I’m taking a lot out, much remains. I know which scenes are flat, and I’d love to take those out, but they have to be there (so rewrites for those), but I cannot have a 45,000 word first act (or whatever it’s going to turn out to be). That means that somewhere between 25,000 words and 35,000 words, I have to find a turning point.

That seems really mechanical, I know, but it’s for a good reason: Readers shouldn’t have to read any more than a third of the book before some startling enough happens to make the story new again. No matter how much exciting stuff you put it, if it doesn’t have enough impact to change the protagonist and her story, it’s not a turning point and it doesn’t make the story new. There has to be a “Holy Cow!” moment for both the reader and the protagonist that makes them both look at everything that’s gone before with new eyes, that changes things irrevocably.

The one I had before was a moment when one of the characters goes off in a rage in front of Liz, verbally attacks her, and in that moment Liz realizes that she’s been seeing things the way they were when she left town fifteen years before. She fights back (verbally), she’s not defeated or cowed, but she’s shaken because things have changed in ways she hadn’t realized, and now she’s going to have to look at everything differently. It was a good turning point, but even with the cuts, it going to hit at around 45K, and that’s too long for a reader to read without a wake-up call, in my books anyway.

So I will be turning-point-hunting for the rest of the evening, once I finish the last of the cuts and get them put into the computer. Of course, that’ll give me a 10,000 word head start on the next act, but still, this is not good. I do have that scene where Liz hits her on the head with a rock. I don’t think she’s having a strong enough reaction to that one. Hmmmm.