Today’s post is written by regular contributor Dr John Yeoman.
Every serious author has panicked at some point when drafting their novel.
The story that was conceived as a perfect whole has gone seriously wrong. A major plot line has collapsed or characters refuse to behave as scripted. Worse, the concept itself seems so trite and unoriginal that there appears nothing for it but to toss the whole wretched thing away and start again. Six months of work down the shredder…
Have you ever had that experience?
Don’t panic! Here are five typical challenges you’re likely to meet in your first draft, and how to fix them:
1. The Runaway Plot
Your story logic has become implausible. If your characters are now doing this, they couldn’t have done that three chapters earlier. Or vice versa.
Relax. Probably, every novelist has had that dilemma. J K Rowling admits:
“Halfway through writing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I realised there was a serious fault with the plot … I’ve had some of my blackest moments with this book … One chapter I rewrote 13 times, though no-one who has read it can spot which one or know the pain it caused me,” (Glasgow Herald, July 2000).
Quick Fix: Before you consign that chapter to history, see if you can change something earlier in the story that makes it appear logical. Then weave the chapter back into the story line. If an episode surprised you—the author—it will certainly surprise a reader. That’s a freshness you might want to retain.
2. The Patchwork Quilt
Your scenes are a mess. They’re written the way you planned them, and there is a pattern behind the sequence, but they appear to be all over the place.
Quick Fix: Go back to each scene and drop in some transitional links. A throwaway exchange of dialogue can often do it. For example: “I wonder how the cabin survived that bad storm, John?”|”We’d better take a look.”|“Next month?”|“Yeah, I reckon the mosquitoes will have gone by then.” When the next scene opens four weeks later at the mountain cabin, it’s a seamless transition.
An inexperienced writer will try to rewrite everything. A seasoned author will just cut—or drop in—a few lines and the continuity slips back into place.
3. Hopeless Scenes
You work all week on an episode and discover it’s a digression. Pointless. Irredeemable.
Quick Fix: Cut it, of course. But save it in an Outtakes file. Chances are, you can reuse some of that material elsewhere.
The same applies to Fine Language. Maybe you’ve written a beautiful line of description or characterisation. “Her voice was as soft as doves on a distant hill.” Poetic? No. Pretentious. But it might work if an affected character mutters it to himself, or writes it in a letter or diary. People are allowed to be pretentious when talking, ostensibly, to themselves.
4. The Aberrant Character
Your main players develop interesting but unexpected quirks. Maybe they conflict with the reader’s image of the character. They don’t ring true.
Quick Fix: If your character throws a surprise at the reader, foreshadow it with a brief Characterising Incident earlier in the story.
For example, your protagonist—a tough, veteran cop—has to explore an abandoned mine shaft. He panics. That’s out of character. So present an incident earlier when he refuses to enter an elevator and takes the stairs instead. He explains weakly to his colleagues, “I need the exercise.” But one nudges the other. “Jim has claustrophobia.” The incident seems inconsequential but, when Jim panics in the mine, the reader can understand why.
5. The Peril of Plagiarism
You’ve stumbled on a highly original plot idea. It’s topical. It has ‘best seller’ written all over it. You’ve half finished the story when you read a novel, already published, that’s based on the self-same idea. No, you didn’t steal that idea. But if you submit your novel now, reviewers will cry “Plagiarism!” Won’t they?
Quick Fix: Go back and twist that plot idea radically. Present it in an entirely different way. Probably, nobody will compare the two novels or notice the similarity of themes. And if they do? No matter. Ideas cannot be copyrighted. (Otherwise, only one novel would be allowed in the world with the theme of a vampire lover. Or a hard-boiled detective with a heart of gold. Or… well, you get the idea.)
Just make sure you don’t inadvertently echo any of the names, phrases or other forms of words used in the other novel.
Avoiding Problems in the First Place
The simplest way to avoid many of these problems is to write a detailed synopsis in advance. You’ll need one anyway when the time comes to submit your work to an agent or publisher. Save yourself a lot of agony by preparing the synopsis before you draft the novel.
Use the synopsis to test the plot logic in every episode. The transitions. The plausibility of the characters. Then draft the story around your plan. You’ll know at once when the story’s going off-script.
That said, it’s a military axiom that no plan ever survives its first engagement with the enemy. Rowling plans every novel in detail. “Before I start writing seriously I spend two months re-visiting the plan and making absolutely sure I know what I am doing,” (BBC interview, March 2004). Yet she still came unstuck with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Maybe the characters took over.
If that happens to you, rejoice! Chances are, your story has developed a new vitality. You just have to whip those mischievous characters back into the plot…
Many thanks, Suzannah, for hosting me here again. I look forward to reading people’s own experiences of stories that ‘went wrong’. And how they fixed them!
Perfect, perfect, perfect! My books is very much The Patchwork Quilt right now. I am working on it and it’s a little bit more difficult than I thought it would be. But I can’t wait to get it back on track.
Great post!
I’ve just had to fix up a story where a character was fleeing a state here in Australia and flying directly to a country town. Then my husband told me there were no direct flights to that place and that she would have had to travel to another city in order to catch a flight. I believed him even though i had done my research!!! So……bending to his superior intellect I changed a whole lot of text to accomodate this, only to find that he was wrong! Have to admit that I didn’t rewrite it.
Thanks, Maranna. That strikes a chord. I once wrote an historical fiction story based on the notion, which I believed, that London’s Globe theatre was built in spring 1598. Then I discovered it hadn’t been erected until summer 1599. To update that chronology would have wrecked the story. So I left it alone and nobody noticed 🙂
Sometimes, I think we worry too much…
Your post is bang on!.I’ve been writing my second novel for over a year. It’s 80% done and then I see a movie. The first fifteen minutes of the movie are so similar to the beginning of my novel. And a couple of (minor) characters are duplicates of ‘my’ characters. Put me in a spot. But I plan to finish my novel and then see how to tweak the beginning. Perhaps I will be able to fix it.
Great advice. I have an “outtakes” file for that very reason. The detailed synopsis is a bit more of a challenge for me but something I need to work on.
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Excellent advice – some of it I have never thought of. Getting unstuck sometimes is simple, but we try to imagine no one has ever been here before. Thanks for you timely and well defined advice.
I love these tips. I’ve encountered a few of these issues myself while working on novels. I had a character go rouge on me when I wasn’t watching close enough. I had a plot take twists and turns that weren’t in my outline because I got carried away. I’ve also had characters that I hated writing so much I knew my readers would loathe reading them too much to stick with the story.
It’s amazing how quickly a novel can get away from you if you don’t have a good outline before you start and a leash on your wily characters.
As one who has had to radically reform her first novel, I can definitely identify with this post. I have used almost all of these techniques before! A great post. I will definitely add it to my bookmarks for the next time I feel that dark wave of despair wash over me. 😉
Thank You!, John, for sharing these helpful insights, appreciate the timely and relevant post in my case.
Fantastic article and oh so apt at the moment. I have just completed the first draft to my second book, Fighting Tigers and Flies, and have found many of the pitfalls described in the article. I am about to start my first edit and will keep all these things in mind. An outtake box is an excellent idea…..it is hard to cut, delete, permanently lose a beautiful sentence or paragraph simply because it detracts from the current work but, maybe it will be perfect for the following piece? Thanks so much for your insightful advice.
Hmm it seems like your website ate my first comment (it was extremely long)
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Do you have any tips and hints for novice blog writers?
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Hi John,
This was an extremely useful article to read. Thanks for sharing!
I am presently putting some final touches on a novel and am dealing with a plot hole that I didn’t anticipate in the outline I developed carefully before writing. In my case, I developed a subplot to better explain my antagonist’s motives, but later realized I was making it up as I went along – and this shows in the story. I suppose this is very similar to your point #1, except not just for a chapter.
The main point, though, is that regardless of what a writer must fix, anything is fixable with careful thought and planning. My number one rule is for every minute I spend writing, I spend about 9 minutes thinking about whether that is the best solution. It seems to work so far!
True, Graeme. To write is merely human – but to edit is divine!