The nightmare in the bright, gleaming morning light.
You’ve been slaving away for months at that new and exciting novel, The Unpainted Corner, thrilling at each successive chapter, glorying at the maturation and development of the characters, the stirring pace of the plot, the power of the prose beckoning the reader forward like a literary pied piper. Every morning, you got yourself a steaming cup of caffeinated energy, plopped your butt down in front of that word processor, and took up the tale with gusto, when-last-we-left-our-intrepid-heroes. Forsaking all others, you held troth, ignoring the seductive lure of computer games, news articles, and You Tube videos as you inexorably drove that gleaming manuscript to completion.
Now comes that most anticipated part, the thundering climax of the work when the ends are tied, the conflicts resolved, and the characters, if not enriched or triumphant, at least draw enlightenment from their experience.
And it flops.
Despite all the notes, all the outlines, all the careful and meticulous thought that you have invested in this story and these characters, the climax just doesn’t pop. You’ve extended your life-giving finger to your literary Adam, and yet he’s still lying there, an inert, unmoving mass, undeniable proof you are not an authorial deity even in your own fictitious world.
Well, hell. Gave it your best shot and it turns out like a mud hut in a hard spring rain. Wadda ya do now, sparky? Toss it all in the trash can, physical or electronic, and get back to beating your best score on those video games? I mean, if nobody reads it, nobody will know how bad it is, right? Or, I dunno, maybe try re-write?
Re-writing is a fact of life if you’re an author. But I’m not talking simple word-smithing or applying a little character polish with some cute quirks. No, I’m talking catastrophe, the house of cars in an earthquake type of problem that would require chapter-smashing and life-threatening character-surgery to fix. If you’ve never run into this, it almost certainly has been floating in the darkness of your fears, the nagging question of missing something obvious like having a character running across town to warn people when they could just have hit speed dial.
I had my house of cards collapse around my ears in the most recent manuscript. Can’t say I didn’t see it coming. I had a couple of technical issues that I had not resolved throughout the work, putting it off in the belief I would either be struck with a revelation or the problem would miraculously resolve itself. I mean, I’ve written a dozen books, and they all worked out in the end. Well, not this time. Them chickens came home to roost when it was time to tie it all together in a satisfying climactic scene, because those story strands just weren’t there to get tied.
That was an unpleasant moment, let me assure you, particularly because I really love the book and thought it was going great. Lot of good scenes, clever dialogue, nice plot twists. So what did I do? After the expected period of hand-wringing and self-pity, I got down to work. I wrote two short paragraphs clarifying and resolving the technical issues, getting it clear in my head what I needed to say. Then I went back and started stomping wood, kicking at the beams, seeing what held up and what was rotten timber. Even some of the chapters I liked proved to have some serious soft spots, while I ripped and tore the shaky parts, putting some solid material back in its place. I even added two new chapters as I realized that the characters were likely to be as confused as the readers (and me), and the new material cleaned up a lot of chaos. I did it, and you’d do it, too. Because if you love writing, if you love your book, you’ll fight for it, even when it’s in trouble. Yeah. Particularly when it’s in trouble.
Remember, a book’s not good or bad until it’s published. Up until then, they’re all works-in-progress. Kind of like people. Until you’re on your deathbed, your life is a work-in-progress, capable of improvement, capable of redemption. With characters real or fictitious, the issue isn’t so much where they are at any given time, but what the verdict is in the final draft.
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