Getting There

It's a weird thing.

I've been banging away at this second draft of my novel for what feels like forever. I knew my first draft was a complete mess (as it should be), that I didn't know my characters well enough yet, there wasn't enough tension, and all the motivations didn't work well.

And, to me, knowing that is half the battle. I know where the problems are, and fixing them, while keeping the same skeleton, can be a problem. What makes these characters--which were originally just chess pieces--do what they do? What is coming off as false in the novel? What rings hollow?

And this book, well, this book has been a bitch.

Characters didn't feel realistic. Motivations felt like they'd been done before and some were way to complicated. In my head, the set-up was really simple. On paper, it was like I vomited ideas.

And, so, I started to bang away at the revisions. I started cutting, like I was pulling trees out at their roots. Characters became different, but better. More real.

But it felt mucky. I threw every trick in the book at the novel. Combining characters, cutting whole characters, eliminating ideas, outlining my revisions. But each day I tried to get closer to the ending. It's been hard. Blood from a stone hard.

But today I looked up and I was... at the biggest plot twist in the book. I was at the start of the 3rd act. I was... getting there.

And that felt really good.

I'm not done yet. Not yet.

But I'm getting there.