Apologies for not posting for a while.
My time has been dominated by listening to, and preparing promotional materials for, a new audiobook. But today’s blog is a follow on from my last where I mentioned I’ve been panstering for a while, rather than sticking to my refreshed outline.
And on the days I haven’t been writing, newer plot twists have come to mind. This means I’m making rewrites on my rewrites.
I feel like my characters are guiding me with better options.
It also feels like I’m grasping what my assessor said about this project — I focussed too much on nostalgia rather than plot. And she advised that although there is a major storyline about a couple with issues, the overlying theme is about friendship. The latter is what my characters are also telling me.
This is my novel set in the 1990s which I’ve blogged extensively about. The main plot is about a straight couple while the minor plots follow several gay characters. But one of the straight love interests has done something random, suddenly making him a lot more interesting. Another is developing a drug problem.
This is subtly changing the genre.
The previous draft has a quality similar to my usual work. It’s joyous, devoid of sex scenes, and delves into the characters at a certain depth. I just completed a draft of a manuscript which isn’t always joyous and definitely has sex. I don’t want my 90s project to feel like this other manuscript, but I do want to meet it halfway. And these characters are guiding me in more grittier territory as they make their lives messier.
Before I returned to this project I sensed this is how this novel should feel. And even though I created an excel spreadsheet pointing out the proposed changes for each scene, I’m not completely following that any more. I’m panstering.
I start my writing days editing the previous chapters I wrote.
I do this so there’s a flow into the new chapters I’m about to rewrite. Then I copy the important plot points from the spreadsheet onto the Word document, and continue to be led. I wouldn’t have been comfortable with this approach when I began writing, but now I trust my instincts.
The manuscript already has great scenes which take us to places and events which were part of gay Sydney life in the 1990s. Most of the time I’m just rewriting the dialogue while sometimes making cast changes to a scene. But the skeleton of the era is already weaved into the project thanks to the previous eight drafts.
The changes won’t affect my ending.
They’re just making the journey worth reading.
kevin klehr 