Nearly a year ago, I took my initial draft of my first novel and decided to completely rearrange it, something I did with the help of a pack of orange cards and one of my cats. Moving scenes around to make the story more interesting, provide peaks of interest and hanging endings on chapters and to generally make the story flow better seemed to work quite well. Or so I thought.
Swimming in winter and other time line problems
During my recent “big read through” to start another major round of editing, I started making notes about the seasons and other timing elements throughout the story. When I had a chapter-by-chapter list of these notes in front of me, I realised I had my characters going to an outdoor water funpark in the middle of winter and going skiing in summer! I was truly annoyed at myself. Any reader paying even only half attention to the order of events would realise that the time line of my story had been completely messed up.
So some extra rearrangements became necessary. In some ways, this discovery was a good thing. I had already made some notes for a new scene that I wanted to insert somewhere, and using the new scene to extend the time line a bit and push the skiing into winter looks like it’s going to work out well. My other solution is a bit more drastic, and I’ve swapped some elements of two major scenes around so that the outdoor swimming fun now happens in summer – I had two scenes with a similar set of characters and have managed to have them get the same points across just with a different setting and events.
Other inconsistencies and hoping I haven’t missed any
I can see that it’s a big danger for writers that your novel can be inconsistent – the old problem of a character having dark hair in one chapter and fair hair in the next, with no visit to the hairdresser or the dye bottle in between. It’s really hard to be aware of such inconsistencies yourself, when you are so overly familiar with the characters or setting and so on, and it’s obviously one of the big reasons why you need an editor. But of course, before that stage I’m still hoping to make my novel as good as possible so I’m trying to find all the other odd clashes I could before it goes into another contest or agent.
So, another thing I’ve done during this edit is to make some character notes (now I understand why some people do this first – but I still think I couldn’t and won’t – they would just change as I wrote) so that I can be sure characters don’t get some characteristic that changes oddly halfway through the story. I also want to work on the arc of their development, but I’m struggling with that – that might be a whinge for another day. And I’ve also been double-checking on what facts are “assumed” at each stage, and checking that the reader should be aware of these things, or adding a quick detail that makes it clearer.
Help me again, please – are there are any other big traps I could be falling into? Leave me a note in the comments if you have experienced any strange flaws in your own writing (or reading!).
Reading your blog has made me realise what a complicated thing it is to write a book! Not that I thought it would be easy, but I never considered all these things you have to work out to make sure there’s continuity and reality. Good luck with the shuffling and re-writing. xoxo
Thanks Guera, the shuffling is doing my head in a bit but I seem to be getting on top of things! Don’t worry, I was the same, it never really dawned on me how complicated this process was until I got into the middle of it. Now I feel a bit nasty for being so judgmental of the odd book I’ve read where there were these kinds of errors!
I find that I frequently have to keep notes not only on what each character looks like but also on which characters know what. I have a lot of fun writing conversations where one character knows something nobody else in the conversation does, especially if it’s a murder mystery. It works fine to hold that in your head while writing one scene.
Expanding that to a whole novel (especially if you leave certain chapters untouched for months at a stretch) is far more difficult. I have to have two files open on my computer simultaneously, one for the story itself and the other full of things I need to be reminding myself of constantly. It is more work but it does make life so much easier 30-40 000 words later.
CB, having a file full of reminders sounds like a good idea and one I’ll have to use, I think. I guess I always thought that since I invented it all, I could always remember all the important details – but obviously (now that I think about it) that’s impossible. Thanks for the comment!
[...] I mused on the topic of removing flaws from a novel: in my case, it was flaws of timing with a skiing scene happening in summer and a fun park swim [...]