Mid-book decisions

At the beginning of a novel, anything can happen, and it’s easy to change things one doesn’t like. Your heroine starts off sitting on a rock by Cape Canaveral, longingly watching the rockets take off, and three paragraphs in it suddenly occurs to you that she’s a mermaid. Odds are that you won’t have to rewrite anything, and even if you do, well, it’s only three paragraphs. Then you decide on Page 3 that your hero should be a marine biologist instead of one of the Space-X scientists. Not really hard, especially if he’s only just shown up.

By mid-book, though, those ideas aren’t so easy to incorporate if and when they pop up. There are more constraints, because more has been nailed down in writing.

Consciously or unconsciously, the first thing a writer asks when a new idea starts stirring in the middle of the book is: What’s already true in this book? And does this new idea fit what I already know? (Not just what has been actually put on the page, because sometimes you realize a bit of background or motivation in Chapter Two that won’t start showing up until Chapter Nine, and doesn’t actually become important until Chapter Twenty. But you know – you absolutely know – that it is True for this story. Which means that any new developments that you invent during Chapter Eight have to fit with it, just as much as they have to fit with the actual words-on-paper you already have down.)

When the answer to “does this idea fit?” is “yes,” you get to grin maniacally and maybe add a few things to earlier chapters to establish the heroine’s love of horseback riding or her interest in Chinese jade carving that’s eventually going to result in that cool plot twist you just thought of. If the answer is “no,” you have a possible problem, but you don’t have to toss it out until you’ve answered two more questions.

The first one is, “How much work would it be to make it fit?” Sometimes, the idea can be tweaked. Sometimes, the existing True stuff can be tweaked or pried apart to allow the New Thing to fit. If all it takes to make the cool new idea fit is altering a couple of words that aren’t critical, it’s an easy fix and probably well worth doing. You said your heroine loved mountain-climbing, but your cool idea requires her to love horseback riding; that may simply require changes to a few lines of backstory, or it may mean rewriting a couple of scenes where her mountain-climbing skill was on display.

But sometimes, making the idea fit is going to require a lot of work. If you already have twelve chapters that refer to your heroine’s family in Des Moines, her love of mountain-climbing, and her college degree from Harvard, and if her college roommate and several old family friends have shown up as characters, you’re probably looking at a total rewrite if you suddenly decide in mid-book that she’s a mermaid.

At this point, the final question is: “Is this idea cool enough that it will be worth the time it will take and the work I’m going to have to do to make it fit this story?” If all you have to do is switch the heroine’s mountain-climbing hobby for horseback riding, the answer may be “Yes.” If you’re changing your Harvard-educated Iowan for a mermaid, how much work it is depends on how far into the story you’ve gotten – how much you will have to rip up and throw away.

When you’re looking at a major rewrite, there are two situations in which the answer to “Is this worth doing?” is an unqualified “Yes;” most of the rest of the time, the answer is “No; save it for some other story.”

The first (and often hardest) time the answer is an unqualified “Yes” is when the writer knows that there is something really, really wrong with the story as it stands. It’s gone in the wrong direction, or it’s barely moving at all because your backbrain hates it. You know in your heart that it really needs a total rebuild, but you do not want to scrap all the work you’ve done so far. And you also know that this neat new idea will fix whatever is wrong (even if you can’t actually articulate what that is). But you still do not want to rewrite seven or ten or fourteen whole chapters and make up a new direction for the rest of the book that fits them.

So you spend weeks or months waffling and trying to figure out just a few tweaks that will make your shiny, super-cool idea work with what’s already there without ripping it all up. Eventually, if you are honest, you will come around, sigh, rip the existing manuscript up, and produce a new one that is infinitely better and right. But it takes a while to get to this point.

The second time “Yes” is the only right answer to “Is this idea cool enough that it will be worth the work…?” is, well, when the idea is obviously, unquestionably far better than whatever you started with. This one usually isn’t as hard to do, because of the obviousness of the potential improvement. Who wants to write a second-rate book? It still takes time to come around to it, though.

There are three problems that occasionally crop up with this: First, some writers are such perfectionists that they consider any improvement, no matter how minor, to be “worth the work.” Second, some writers have a backbrain that is a massive idea-generator with an I-can-top-that complex, resulting in multiple massive revisions that never actually get to the end of the story, because every time they hit Chapter Fourteen, their backbrain hands them another massively super-cool better-than-before-faster-stronger idea, and they rip up the first half of their manuscript and start over. Third, the middle of a book is a miserable slog for many, many writers, and the temptation of getting out of it by ripping everything up and doing something totally different can be overwhelming.

It is therefore a good idea to slow down and consider carefully, even when one is quite sure one has an obvious “yes, change it all!” on one’s hands. This is particularly necessary if the writer notices a pattern developing – either a huge pile of half-finished manuscripts and no complete ones, or a single story that has eighteen different sets of beginning chapters, but which has never gotten past the mid-book stage. If the writer is happy with this state of affairs and doesn’t care about building an audience or making a living writing, fine; if not, they need to lay down some ground rules for themselves to limit how many times they’re willing to restart a story and under what circumstances.