Revision Drive

I cannot put a finger on what exactly triggered my current “revision drive”, but 2 days after I returned from my big trip to India, I spontaneously and seemingly out of the blue took out a novel that I had abandoned as a “failure” in 2012. I read it again, got an idea how to fix it and worked on it intensively for two weeks. I abandoned one aspect and rewrote the ending. Next I jumped immediately into a novel that I abandoned half a year ago and got an idea how to fix this one too, even more radical than the 2012 one. With the 2015 novel I threw out the main character and am making now two side characters into the main ones while keeping the general story idea.

I am quite amazed by my radical revision, I haven’t changed the main character in a novel yet. I am enthralled by what’s going on and I wonder what the hell triggered this radical revising?

I talked with a friend about it and he suggested – the general chaos in India that I saw? After giving that some thought, I tend to agree with him. The astounding chaos I encountered in India showed me another lifestyle, other problems, other possibilities than my European and Japanese background offers. I cannot even fathom how deep the Japanese influence goes, since I’m too far emerged into the Japanese lifestyle after more than 15 years out here, but India was such a sharp contrast to the in its own way heavily regulated and orderly life in Japan that it triggered a different point of view. It opened up a path of possibilities.

Throwing out the main character? OMG! Hm… actually, why not? What would happen if I center the story around those two side characters? Aren’t they actually much more interesting? Haven’t you abandoned the story because it doesn’t work, is too passive? Won’t it become much more active when you focus on those other guys? Won’t there be a completely different dynamic if you do that? The answer is “yes!” – at least in this case and I am enthusiastically rewriting the entire novel and have fallen in love with those two former side characters.

In the case of the 2012 novel I changed something about the world. I originally wanted it to be a tidally locked planet, but the mechanics didn’t work out. Now I suddenly thought, why the heck does it have to be a tidally locked planet? The story and the characters will work on any planet, in fact they’ll work better if that tidally locked planet idea is thrown overboard.

So, this is what I’m doing since 27th of December, heavily rewriting those two novels and I’m suddenly feeling very good about both of them.

They also make me postpone some publishing plans, yes, sure, but what the heck, I gotta use that current revision drive