Getting to a Coherent Draft

The structure of a novel can make or break it. If it's well-structured—as in the pacing is good, the events happen in the most logical order (even if that's not necessarily chronologically), and the characters do things you'd expect them to do—that's more than half the battle. And if you're lucky, the structure is pretty good starting with the first draft. Most of my novels/novellas are like this (now—maybe not in the beginning), but not all of them.

One of the novels I'm working on now wasn't so lucky. The first draft was okay. It was actually pretty good until about 2/3 of the way through. And then it kind of fell flat. The ending sucked, to put it bluntly.

So on my first round of revisions, I rewrote the ending entirely. My protagonist made a better decision to start with, and then I added in a new twist after that, and then everything wrapped up more or less neatly. But I still didn't really like it. I kept looking back at my original ending, wondering if there was something there after all.

In addition to the ending issues, there was also an issue with one of the main characters (Hank). His motivations weren't clear, making him seem just a little too passive. I decided the best way to fix this, and the most natural way, would be to add in a few scenes from his POV throughout the novel and even to rewrite some existing scenes in his POV.

What I ended up with was a vague idea of what I needed to do, and no clue where to start actually doing it. It was a big project to tackle. And over the past two nights, I tackled it. Here's what I did:

I started out by grabbing the printouts I had of the entire last draft I had, as well as the ending of the first draft. Then I opened up Google Docs and started a new spreadsheet (please don't go running away at the mention of that word, I promise there are no formulas involved). And I went through the last draft, scene by scene, and entered each scene into the spreadsheet. I included the scene number (chapter.scene), the POV character (since I'll be adding in scenes from an extra POV), a brief description of what happens in each scene, the characters included in the scene, a space to enter any changes that need to be made, and whether a draft of that scene had been written. See? No math.

I then went through the ending from the first draft and entered those scenes into the spreadsheet. I entered each of those chapters after their respective chapters already in the spreadsheet. To keep track of which draft was which, I labeled all the scenes from the first draft with an "A" and all the ones from the most recent draft with a "B" (it seemed the most logical way to do it, though you should do it however makes sense to you).

At the same time, I entered places where I thought it would make sense for Hank to have a scene, or highlighted scenes that should be rewritten from his POV. Some scenes need to be split so that part is from the current POV, and part is from Hank's POV.

From there, I took out a notebook and pen, and went through the ending scenes to see how I might be able to use scenes from each to come up with a coherent ending. A few scenes will be eliminated, and at least a couple need to be rewritten substantially to work within this new outline, but I'm going to be able to salvage about 75% of both endings. Which has the benefit of boosting my word count quite a bit (this was on the short side for the genre to begin with, so longer is good in this case).

Then, to finish it all off, I imported the two draft files to Scrivener, and created a new document where I copied the respective scenes into the correct order. This way, when I finally go to make all the changes, I have everything in the proper order, and can do all the editing in one marathon session (or possibly a weekend).

I'd love to dive into the edits on this book right now, but I have too many other projects demanding my attention, including The Steam and Steel Chronicles, a super-secret big project (which I'll disclose as soon as I can), and the first fifty pages of Dragon Rider (I still loathe that title!) to work on in the next few weeks and months. But knowing that it's waiting for me when I do have the time is a huge bonus, and makes it much easier for me to focus on the projects that need my attention.

If anyone has other tips to share about tackling this kind of rewrite, I'd love to hear about them in the comments!