How to Know What Needs Fixing

Ever have something nagging at you, but you can't quite put your finger on what it is? Yesterday I finished listening to my manuscript ~ three long hours ~ and I liked what I heard. So where's the problem?

The difference between yesterday and the day before was that yesterday I felt engaged in the story. The dialogue was snappy, the sequencing logical, the character building satisfying.  I went from being fatally depressed to wondering why I'd been so down on the story.

Well, the problem is the boring parts. (Isn't it always?) When her record label sent Leah on a mini-tour of Texas, I had no idea that it would be anything but one more link in the chain of indignities she'd already suffered. She endured a mortifying publicity shoot and a collaboration with a hot songwriting team, who tore her song to shreds and turned it into a cringy mess. I didn't yet know how bad her tour would go; just that it would. But something unexpected happened in the midst of it; she fell in love. So, that should have been really interesting, except it wasn't. It's a big driver of the rest of the story, and I blew it. That's one of the hazards of discovery writing; good ideas pop up, but I'm so focused on my original idea that I don't know enough to capitalize on the unexpected one. I'd planned to dwell on hotel reservations being lost and other assorted mishaps, which I did, and thus I lost sight of the important plot points.

Clearly, this will need to be rewritten.

And it's not just the Texas scenes. From the moment Leah arrives in Nashville, the story plunges into dullness. It turns into a laundry list of tasks she needs to complete, which have no real point and certainly no spark. I can do better than this, somehow. It's not wrong to keep those scenes, but man, something interesting needs to happen within them.

So, I'll be doing the thing I swore I wouldn't do ~ rewriting. At least it won't be all one hundred thousand words. I guess I can put off my decision on whether to publish a while longer. This will be torture, frankly. I'm no longer in writing mode, and once I reach the clearing, it's hard to force myself back into the forest. I don't want to go there! 

What I dread the most is taking already written scenes and rejiggering them. That's not how I work best. I'm excited when I start from scratch, not when I already know what happens (a major reason why I could never be an outliner). And it's not as if everything I wrote needs to be trashed, so I don't want to just start over.

I guess it's time to open up another blank document.