It always happens to me

As regular readers of this blog may remember, a couple of months back I realized I'd gotten partway into the third of the Frontier Magic books and realized that I'd gotten the events in the wrong order.

Not "wrong" in the sense that I'd gotten cause and effect reversed (you know, the sort of thing where someone's suffering from a gunshot wound before the gun has actually been fired, or deducing information from a clue they haven't found yet). Wrong in the sense that one subplot had taken over, resulting in a whole lot of too-similar scenes in a row. Also wrong in the sense that the order of the scenes, if closely examined, didn't build up the way it needed too.

I ended up scraping the entire ms. back to paragraph 2 and starting over. I have now, finally, come nearly back to the end of the material I'd supposedly already covered, so I thought I'd update you on the situation.

The ms. is twice as long as it was in its original form, because there are scenes from several more subplots interspersed with the original scenes. The first-round material is now in a much more sensible order, has more logical reason behind it, and isn't so repetetive. The characters are, as usual, filling up far more time than I expected with clearing up important loose ends - they were supposed to have been on the road long before this, but what can you do? Scenes that happened in midwinter now happen in midsummer, which meant keeping a careful eye on the descriptive bits and stage business so that I didn't end up with people shaking snow off their coats in August.

I don't call this kind of thing "revising," though there's really no reason not to except personal preference. I call it "rewriting" or "redrafting." It's a way of fooling my backbrain into considering the story from a completely new angle. I'm not just patching up gaping holes in the roof; I'm building a whole new roof, though I do get to reuse some of the old material, if it's in good enough shape. It's a matter of attitude.

The other thing about this kind of do-over is that this time, I didn't end up wasting months agonizing about whether I really had to do it and looking for ways to salvage the work I'd done without going back to zero and rewriting the whole plot. I've done this twice before, and each time, it took me nearly a year to suck it up and ditch the chapters that had to be ditched. That's a year of wasted time, because I wasn't actually making forward progress on anything, just waffling and complaining and agonizing about how I wasn't getting anywhere. Third time's the charm, I guess.

I'm going through all this partly because I promised I'd keep people updated, but also because…well, because it's one of the hard parts about being a writer. (Which is why it took nine to fourteen months to psych up to do it the first two times I did it.) I am hopeful that the fact that it only took me a week to recognize and admit the fundamental problem this time means that next time (and I'm sure that there will be a next time, though I hope it's a few more books down the road) I will notice sooner and be able to fix it faster. Because the earlier you spot this kind of thing, the less you have to rewrite and the easier the whole process is.

Now all I have to do is finish the darned thing.