I've been dwelling on this novel for wayyyyy too long. The plot comes to me in bits and pieces and I eventually just forced myself to churn out a plot arc through a daily word count quota during National Novel Writing Month.
Now I have, theoretically, a completed novel in front of me, but I'm still not entirely sure of the plot arc, or what happens or who is who. Some plotlines dissolve midway, some appear midway (for example, in a chase scene with characters that I still don't understand who they are and what they want). In other words, a total mess. Some sense of what it's about, but a LOT of confusion.
I don't know how to approach the rewrites. With the first draft, I essentially forced myself to write and push toward the ultimate endpoint, and figured I could work through the details in rewrites. Now that I've reach the rewrite stage I still have no idea how things will pull together, and my options seem to be either to sit back and hope it will subconsciously sort itself out (been trying that for a couple of years; still waiting) or to force myself to sit down and keep pushing out wrong, crappy stuff.
The danger is I'll start polishing the turd, line editing and making the prose sound better, when I need to be looking at a wide-angle plot level. The better the prose gets, the harder time I'll have cutting those scenes later...
Help! How do you edit the plot of a novel when you're still not sure what it's all about, or what the plot points should be? I always assumed by the time I finished I'd have a good sense of the skeleton of the story, and just have to move the bones in the right place and straighten out the meat. But I barely even know what kind of animal it is, let alone what the bones look like!
Now I have, theoretically, a completed novel in front of me, but I'm still not entirely sure of the plot arc, or what happens or who is who. Some plotlines dissolve midway, some appear midway (for example, in a chase scene with characters that I still don't understand who they are and what they want). In other words, a total mess. Some sense of what it's about, but a LOT of confusion.
I don't know how to approach the rewrites. With the first draft, I essentially forced myself to write and push toward the ultimate endpoint, and figured I could work through the details in rewrites. Now that I've reach the rewrite stage I still have no idea how things will pull together, and my options seem to be either to sit back and hope it will subconsciously sort itself out (been trying that for a couple of years; still waiting) or to force myself to sit down and keep pushing out wrong, crappy stuff.
The danger is I'll start polishing the turd, line editing and making the prose sound better, when I need to be looking at a wide-angle plot level. The better the prose gets, the harder time I'll have cutting those scenes later...
Help! How do you edit the plot of a novel when you're still not sure what it's all about, or what the plot points should be? I always assumed by the time I finished I'd have a good sense of the skeleton of the story, and just have to move the bones in the right place and straighten out the meat. But I barely even know what kind of animal it is, let alone what the bones look like!
I do all this in One Note, so I can use noteflags to make the scenes for those thing.