Half-Hearted Editing

At some point, I plan to really dig into editing my novel. Or not. No, I do think I will. I confess, though, that absence hasn't made the heart grow fonder. That's sad, because I dedicated so much time writing it. 

Maybe it's actually better on the page than it is in my mind, but reading Nathan Bransford's writing tips has revealed a multitude of problems with my story. Its biggest red flag is the most obvious: a main character needs a goal. I struggled with establishing a goal for the MC; well, to be honest, I didn't struggle; I didn't even think in terms of goals. Throughout the course of the story, she does have goals, maybe mini-goals, but not one BIG GOAL. Regrettably, she lets herself get carried along by circumstances. It's barely (or never) clear what she actually wants. I'm guessing an ambivalent main character is not what readers want. What are they supposed to be invested in?

Leah doesn't set out to have a career in the music business. That ship sailed long ago. She wasn't even sure she wanted one when she was in her twenties. Her mother wanted her to have one, so she dutifully sent off demo tapes to record labels, but when she was met by silence, it didn't affect her. She just kept on playing gigs with her band, night after night, and that was her life. It wasn't until the band's inevitable breakup that she was forced to do something else, and that "something else" was to run away.

Once she decided to settle in Chance, her goal was to find a job, and to prove she could, I suppose, do something other than sing. Then when her heart got broken, her goal was to get away. A record label's offer was her solution. She still didn't want a music career; it was just a means of escape.

Thus, we have the quintessential aimless main character. Exciting! I don't think an inviting blurb would be, "It all comes together in the end."

I'm beginning to wonder if editing a bad story is even worth my time. And I don't just have mental dilemmas, but physical ones. I never separated the story into chapters, because it didn't seem to matter at the time. 

There's a psychology tied to chapters ~ each one has to start with an interesting premise, and end with the reader wanting to keep reading. That causes a writer to artificially create drama just for the sake of drama. However, I know the story needs to be separated into chapters, so I halfheartedly tried to create Chapter One. The accepted chapter length is between 1,500 and 5,000 words, which is obviously not a strict guideline, but that being said, five hundred words would be pitiful. So I looked for a natural break point. I then pasted the chapter into a new document, and I sparked on the idea that if I only focus on one chapter at a time, rather than a long block of text, editing might be easier. (Doubtful, but I'm grasping at straws here.)

And that's as far as I've gotten ~ Chapter One. At this point I'm just "picking at editing", a tiny bite here, a sentence rearrangement there. I tend to have different ideas on different days, so I added to a paragraph to make it more interesting, only to find that I'd already conveyed that same information further down in the chapter. When I discovered that, I was in a quandary as to whether to keep the original passage or the new one, so I'm driving myself crazy with stupid, useless minutiae. At this rate, I'll manage to edit one chapter a month. (And who knows how many there are in total?)

I don't think I need a professional editor, per se; I need someone to just do it for me. Just fix it, dammit! Turn it into something good! This is too hard!

I sort of envy the writers who start with an outline. I bet they know their main character's goal. They no doubt have each chapter formulated in their minds, too. So organized! Then there's me. I didn't have a clue what the story would be about when I started. I'm not sure I know even now.

I've managed to create a mess for myself. Do I have the desire to fight my way out of it?