My Novel Gets Better As It Goes Along

Maybe somewhere along the line I became a better writer, but as I move through the aural reading of my manuscript, it becomes more interesting. That's good, but as I've noted before, if the first part of the story is boring, no one will ever read far enough to get to the good parts.

After I discovered so many flaws in the earlier passages, I stopped making notes, because "do better" is hardly specific, but I've pretty much committed to memory the sections that are truly bad. Fixing them is going to be daunting, though. 

Objectively, the main problems spring from the original scenes, the ones I scavenged from my poorly-written novella. But setup is a bitch. A story has to have it, but it has to be presented so well that a reader won't simply close the book and give up out of boredom. My main character isn't the confrontational sort, so I can't start the story with her getting into a road rage fistfight or something else "action packed". It's a story that unfolds, fortunately or unfortunately. She meets people, she gets to know them, she learns from them; while also doing things, of course. I guess it's a character driven novel. And listening to it being read back to me, the story really comes alive when she's interacting with those people. I used to fret that I relied on dialogue scenes too much, but I couldn't have been more wrong.

Listening to my manuscript has also revealed a bad tendency I have ~ writing too many short, declarative sentences. I did it for impact, not because I don't know how to write a nicely flowing sentence, but I've done it too many times and it reads choppily. (Completely made-up example: "It had to be done." Then I go on to detail what the character did and an explanation of why.) I actually don't find that to be bad when used occasionally, except it was more than occasional. This also reveals the difference between hearing and reading. These tics don't necessarily read badly, but they "sound" bad. (I'm not planning to create an audiobook, however.)

I've decided to listen to my manuscript all the way through before I start crying tackling any revisions. And it's long, dammit! Then will probably come months of banging my head against the wall, trying to shape the thing up. But at the moment, I'm determined to turn it into something; I'm not quite ready to give up. There's a good story here; now I need to prove it.