Here’s the story of my heartbreak:
I finally finish my third (fourth? fifth?) first draft in the fall of 2015 (you know, when I originally thought I’d have a polished manuscript completed…). I’m excited. It’s been a long road, but the hard work is done. I have rough sketch of the whole book, the whole plot. I know the ending so I can go back and touch up the beginning, make sure everything fits together. I know I still need to “wordsmith” it—to find the perfect word for the emotion and tone of the scene—but that’s ok, that’s easy. As is the proofreading. It’s all downhill from here. I work and I work and I work.
Until March 2016.
I’m 20 pages from the end of my real second draft. I’ve had to change a lot, but it’s all for the better.
Except I can’t end it.
I mean, I have an end, I had one from the first draft. But it’s not sitting right. It doesn’t work. I think about it. And think. I no longer go to the computer. I lie on my bed, despondent. Why can’t I finish this last section?
I brainstorm. I change the ending. Now Lyra ends up surviving a submarine blowing up. (And if you don’t know where the submarine came from, neither do I.)
Finally, finally, it comes to me.
The whole damn book doesn’t work. All two years of effort.
I had Lyra survive a nuclear bomb; she’s supposed to kill the bad guy. But why wouldn’t her country (the U.S.) have retaliated? I tried to explain that away with my fictional African country of Taifa being allies with China, but now I’m getting into geopolitics that I have little interest in. Then I go back further. Why did the bad guy (Moto) even launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. in the first place? And why Thorin Hill, this suburb I invented outside of Boston?
There was no answer. There was no reason for the bad guy to attack.
If there’s no reason for the bad guy to attack, there’s no reason for my heroine to survive an attack that never happened, nor any reason for her to go on a quest to eliminate a bad guy who isn’t yet a bad guy because he hasn’t attacked because he has no reason to attack. (He knows he’ll be decimated if he attacks).
Better to realize this now than get a stackful of rejections from publishers?
Sure.
Didn’t make me feel better.
I had two solutions: abandon my idea; cut my losses and run or…
Start over.
I bucked up. Dammit, I’m going to finish this novel if it’s the last thing I do (I fear it will be…)
But how to make it better? How to fix it?
- Get rid of the nuclear bomb. If Lyra, a 17-year-old untrained civilian is expected to assassinate the bad guy, it better be because the people in charge don’t want to waste their time or resources on him. So the bad guy has to start out as a minor threat—something the politicians don’t think is yet worthy of attack. Only our far-sighted spy Annie appreciates Moto’s true threat.
- What can Lyra survive to show her super cells, if not a bomb? A terrorist attack.
- Why would a terrorist attack Lyra’s suburban school? This is where I got stuck again. I knew I could make it about religious extremism, very much like the present-day circumstances, but I didn’t want to be stuck with, well, reality. I want to write about characters’ emotions without worrying about whether I’m getting the realistic details accurate.
I’ve read a lot of “how-to write” books over the years. Almost all of them say to start with the story. Sure, a theme, that main idea, the main message, will emerge from the story, and it’s important, but almost all of them warn us new writers, don’t start with theme.
They’re wrong.
That’s what I was missing. A purpose to my book. A message, a lesson Lyra would learn at the end, something more than “I want to kill the bad guy to get revenge on him blowing up my family”.
Considering I teach theme constantly to my students, point out how important it is, I felt stupid I couldn’t see it was missing from my own book before.
So now I had to work on a main idea.
But I’d already started on one when I was musing about the terrorist attack on Lyra’s school being religiously based. In fact, the reason I had I already used for Lyra’s boyfriend breaking up with her (God doesn’t want their relationship to work), gave me my very starting point.
What if Lyra lived in a society in which there was no religion? What if she’d been taught to believe that so many historical conflicts were based on unyielding religious dogma that all religion was evil? What if she was then pulled into a society in which there was religion? What would she learn?
My ideas came together.
But man, I still had so much to do, and by this point I just wanted it done. I was also working full time and taking care of my family, made even more challenging with my husband’s heavy travel schedule.
I gave myself a challenge: I wanted to write 300 pages (yes, yes, publishers go by word count, but I was only focused on a first draft (again) so I stuck with pages). 100 pages a month. 25 pages a week.
It was tough. It was frustrating hell at times. (Why, why am I putting myself through this? No one cares whether I write a YA novel or not. Even if I finish it, it may not be good, and certainly won’t be groundbreaking, earth-shattering or world-changing, so why?)
I missed my target by a week. I finished my sixth first draft in early July.
I’m now on my second draft—lots of work left. I’m 100 pages into it and I’ve changed up almost every scene—except the main idea.
I like it.
Maybe I could like it better, which is why I’ll keep working on it.
I hope you’ll join me for the rest of the journey.