On Also Being Stuck

For this post, I wanted to pick up on the same themes of Liv’s previous post.

I’m finding myself a bit stuck as well.

I’ve been working on the second draft of my latest manuscript THE BREWMANCER, and honesty’s it’s been brutal. I’m basically rewriting the entire first half from scratch and reworking most of the flashback interludes scattered through the book. I made some major changes to the plot when I was about two-thirds of the way through and now I’m paying the price.

While it’s tough going now, I still think the changes were for the best. The original ending – which is now sort of in the middle – was really depressing and involved the death of a major character and the bad guys winning. I’ve said before that I love a good Bad Ending, but this one was a little too Bad. And it wasn’t the right ending for what this story had become. The new ending features a victory for a our protagonists, but still with a cliffhanger to hook for the next installment.

It’s definitely a better ending, a quite frankly, I was having trouble coming up with enough plot to fill the space between the beginning and the originally ending. Moving that to the middle really helped, because it provided a catalyst for the action in the new second half. That said, all of the rewriting has me bogged down. I’ve had to rework a lot of the relationships plotted out originally and some of the major character arcs as the books morphed over the course of its completion.

I want to make this manuscript work, but this is probably the hardest second draft I’ve done.  A lot of that has to do with the fact I’ve learned over the course of three manuscripts you can’t just wing it on your redrafts. And believe me, I’ve just winged on a couple of them. When I’ve done that before, I ended up with disjointed and poorly edited stories afterwards. I know now the what work needs to be done and it needs to be done right.

And maybe that’s why it’s so hard this time – I know how much work it’s already been and how much more there is to go. There’s a small voice in my head as I slog through these revisions that whispers every so often:

Is this worth it?

Sometimes I wonder for a moment if it really is.

Then I remember years of work I’ve put into this craft. If I quit now, that would have all been for nothing. Then I remember all the people I’ve seen celebrating on social media on their Book Birthdays. If I quit now, I’ll never get to see my own Book Birthday.

Social media can be a big help on this front. Seeing friend’s progress and succeed is a driver. I’d be lying if a bit of professional jealousy at seeing other writers make book deals, hit the bestseller list, etc wasn’t a motivating factor too. But my biggest driver from social media is successful authors who have celebrated a half dozen or so Book Birthdays talk about their struggles. No matter how many times you hit the NYT Bestsellers List, there’s still a ton of work that goes into writing and rewriting that next book.  That fact could be just as daunting for an established, successful author is inspirational. For me it, shows that I’m not just struggling alone, that other writers, prolific and praised ones, aren’t just whizzing from book to book without a care.

It means I’m doing something right.

So I’m going to keep pluggin along, wading through these edits as I try to make this a coherent story. It’s going to take longer than I thought it would, and that’s okay. The work will be worth it in the end.