BecMountainBlue said:
The book now is different to the book I started with in chapter one and now I'm worried that I have a confused story. It was originally quite whimsical but towards the last 1/2 to 1/4 of the book there are some more complex issues that come into play and now it's taken a more serious tone.
A lot of people, especially early on in learning the craft, sort of drift in and out of different styles and voices while they're trying to find their own. It's normal. And a lot of times, we do end up with a different book than what we thought we started with. So that's all normal. What you do, then, is revise the book and rewrite the parts that don't match so that you have a consistent style and voice throughout. It's okay for a book to start light and get heavier, but if the first half has a lot of whimsy and humor, you do want to make sure you've carried some of that through to the end. If you think things have gotten confused, try creating an outline from your draft. Maybe it will help you see what belongs or doesn't or where a story thread has gone wonky.
How many characters is too many? I know in Harry Potter for example there are quite a few when you include the teachers, but I'm worried I have too many minor stories going on that could distract the reader.
I have my main character (11yr old girl), her best friend (12 yr old boy), main character's parents, an elderly man who is central to the story, a villain character, and a woman who lives in the town who is tied to the mother with a minor story line.
Each story is going to be different, and no one can really tell you (short of having like 200 characters or something) if you have too many without reading the story. I think this is a case where you need to find some beta readers and let them see if they're confused or distracted by too many side plots. But from what you've indicated here, this does not seem like too many characters for an upper MG story.
My other question relates to structure - how closely do you follow the "rules" about where to put plot points etc.? For this book I've tried to loosely follow a plot structure plan but I find it really restricts my creativity and stops the flow of my writing.
Well, there are a lot of different rule sets and methods for structure that you could try. I've enjoyed books that follow a strict structure, books that seem loosely based on a structure, and books that seem to just meander around all over. It just depends on the story and the way it's written.
For my part, I was meandering and needed to start applying some structure. What I was ending up with was just scene after only vaguely related scene and it wasn't going anywhere. So I started trying to follow the structure laid out in Save the Cat!. At first, I felt really confined. It was nice to be putting things into more of an actual story format, but I also felt like I had to remove a lot of my subplots and important events because they didn't fit the structure as I saw it. But recently, I've been looking at examples where people have taken popular stories and shown where the structure is (in Save the Cat!, it's called a Beat Sheet). Those examples showed me that within each "beat" (your catalyst, your turning point, etc), there's actually a lot more happening than I thought there could be, like all the named parts of the story are really just containers around smaller stories that serve larger purposes in the overall plot. So I'm looking at putting some of my other plots back in, now. So maybe you could look at some examples of popular works plotted out or experiment with what you can do within the structure you're using. Some people just use structure as a guideline.
But yeah, it does sound like a lot of your questions could only be answered (beyond just theoretically) by a good beta. These things can't really be taken in isolation.
Good luck though. I understand your frustration.