Changing the Plot

One of the hardest things I find as an author is when I give myself more work to do than I originally planned.

During NaNoWriMo in November of 2018, I worked on the third book of a series. When I finished that month, I put it aside and began on the fourth book of the series (there are nine in total). That was going along nicely, and I had almost finished it when I had a brain fart about the plot. As I thought it over, I realised that I wasn’t really addressing the issue raised by the first section of the book. So I filed it away in the pressure cooker and left it alone. I the meantime, I edited the third book. Even though it still needs editing, I cleaned it up a bit to suit my goals.

With the edit done and set aside, I went back to book four. I felt I could address the issues I had not covered. I made a couple of minor changes to the first part of the book, but there wasn’t much more to do be done with it. Everything was going to happen in part two.

The program I use to write my stories gives me the chance to break down my writing by scene. Using this to my advantage, I went over each the beginning of part two and worked out how things were going to happen. I was able to re-use quite a number of scenes by changing the set-up. In essence, I was able to use the already written text. There was a lot of jumping forwards and backwards. I was moving scenes to places where events hadn’t taken place that they referred to, and vice versa. I’m sure there are still things that will need to be addressed because of the new location of scenes, but that’s what’s editing is for.

Whilst it’s very frustrating, it’s all part of the art of writing. If a book goes smoothly the first time, then I celebrate until I start editing. That’s when I go back and say, why? Or how? Or when? Or what? Or even you stupid idiot. Usually if I come across those questions, I put the story aide and let it stew away for a while. most times that can be months, rarely is it quicker. I know I said above that I started on book four, set it aside to edit book three and then went back to book four. In this case it was good timing. I think it was about a month from finishing book three in November to when i started editing and then that only took me about five or six days to get that done. More often than not, I edit as I go, despite many people saying that we should just wrote and edit later. I can’t do that usually. If the story is not flowing as I wrote it, then I will struggle to continue. Even though I work with an outline of what should happen and in what order, when I actually flesh it out, the writing has to be clean, and the grammar and spelling correct.

Plot is important and needs to treated respectfully and honestly. If the plot is weak then the reader will see that and potentially put the story down. You are the best judge of the plot. Spend time on it. Work it out. Make sure it works and flows. Then, when you go to flesh out the rest of the story, the plot will direct you how to write.

Plot thy story.

Enjoy.