So I had written my mystery novel. I'm bad at outlining. I'm more of a write as the mood and whim takes me sort of author, which is something I've had to work on quite a bit. It's a terrible struggle for me to impose discipline on my writing.
I had a sort of mini-problem in the beginning, which I dwelt on for 20 pages, before getting deep into the actual heart of my mystery. And I never came back to that mini-problem. And every reader I had, said they enjoyed it, but they kept waiting for that mini-problem to come back and be important. And it never did.
And deep down, I knew that was a problem. But I couldn't figure out how to weave it in, or make it more relevant than as a backdrop to introduce my main characters and provide some action.
Last night, I had a dream about the book, and I realized that my main villain needed to be the one character I mentioned the least. I saw instantly how to re-write and re-weave the book so that both plots were related and relevant. And unfortunately, it's going to involve a huge ginormous rewrite. But it will work, I think.
I'm having to start entirely over (though granted, I do have the large chunks of text written that I can use and paste where possible.) but I think the book will be better and stronger for it. And now that I can see my way forward to that better book, I'm feeling inspired all over again.
I'd been so tempted just to fling it out into the agentsphere, but the other day I read a fantastic post on a great agent blog about how you shouldn't submit hoping that the agent will fix the problems with your book, and it hit me square between the eyes. So.. Here goes. Again.
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