When your novel is falling apart at the seams

I'm having this problem right now with one of my stories. It sounded like such a good, fun concept in my head, but I feel like what's coming out is garbage.

This is just one person's advice, so take it with a grain of salt-I'm going to keep trucking with it. I know that my revision job will be intense, but I want to see what I can salvage out of a first attempt. At the very least, it will tell me what's worth keeping and what I should trash if I have to do the dreaded page one rewrite.

Also-is any of what you have salvageable? I solved the problem of one of my novels veering into mind-numbingly boring territory by cutting out a third of it. Sometimes precise cuts can really make a difference, and then go from there.

I can't rightly speak for what to do before a manuscript is finished. I often don't spot these things until I've finished the first draft. So, the only thing left for me to do is disassemble it and put it back together properly.

Because I'm a titanic pantser, (I know so little of my story before it's written) if I discovered so many issues with my story before it was finished, I'd be likely to start over. Unexplored possibilities and plot holes would likely change the entire course of the story.

Take it as you will.

For me, I think it would be an issue of how hopeless I think the novel is. Does it need a completely new outline and structure? (Was there an outline in the first place? If not, that might part of the problem.) Do I need to spend more time with my characters? Usually I don't do character sheets, but if I feel like I don't know them well enough to make them real people, then maybe those would be useful.

If I had a novel that seemed like a mess but could still have potential if I re-plotted it completely, then I'd re-plot it before writing anything more of it. Then I'd decide: do I want to keep writing from this point, finish up the new plot, and then go back and fix the rest? If it looks like too huge of a nightmare, I suppose I'd scrap the whole thing and start fresh. This would be painful, with pain directly proportionate to word count. But if I thought it was so far gone, it might feel better and ultimately go faster if I just started from scratch. And the end product might be better.

However, if I thought my basic structure was okay and things just needed some serious smoothing down the road, I'd write the crappy first draft and then do major rewrites.

If you suspect, however, that what's going on is not indeed a true mess but actually your inner evil critic sitting on your shoulder, then flick that critic away. And I know this is going to sound flip, but you just have to let yourself go with what feels natural in the first draft, and then worry about all the fixing in revision. Otherwise you may find yourself completely stalled and frozen by anxiety as you try to appease the inner editor.

I finish and then I move on to the next story. IMO it's better to keep writing new stories until one figures out what it takes to make a solid story. But it's really important to finish whatever you start (even if it's a short-cut finish, just keep it in the narrative voice), so *don't quit* to start the new story.

Personally? I would keep on truckin'. Just because its full of holes and nonsense now, doesn't mean it will be in the end. Instead of looking at the 'faults' with self-criticism, build on what you have, take the story in a few different directions, take chances.

I sense you know this stuff, but a little reassurance never hurts.

Go for it.

It depends whether or not this is your first draft. The first draft is going to be filled with plot holes, it's going to have some bad writing in it, and yes, you are absolutely going to hate it and be discouraged by it. If this is the case, absolutely keep on, don't give up, maybe step away from it for a few months, but definitely don't walk away from it just yet.

However, if you are a few revisions in and are still finding it unmanageable, you might want to take a step back and think about whether or not you really like this project, and if it is worth the frustration it seems to be causing you. I know, this can be a near impossible question to answer, but one worth asking just the same. Another good thing to do might be to get a beta reader if you haven't already. Preferably one over the internet, whom you don't know (from my experiences at least, your friends might blow a lot of smoke and boost your self-esteem, but you're typically not left with much constructive criticism beyond "Oh, it was wonderful.").

I'd keep goin at it until you know it's a lost cause.

Plow right on through to the end. You'll have plenty of time to fill in plotholes, fix characters, tie up loose ends, and other what-not after you write "The End" the first time.

The first draft isn't.

Well, this happened to me once. I stepped back from it, and looked what was wrong, what didn't make any sense and so forth. I then hammered it down and started from the scratch -- or almost, the concept was roughly the same.

I really can't finish a draft where I know there's this canon black hole in the middle of it, so I need to get it fixed before finishing. But each case is different, and so every writer.

I have just kept trekking on with it, and figure that I will go back to it eventually and fill in the gaps, etc. However that was my first novel that is just sitting around waiting for me to do something with it and I'm on to another completely different novel, in part because I don't know now how I'm going to go back and rework all of the missing stuff. So, it depends on your patience level with your novel, I think.

It depends. Where are you with your writing? If it's your first draft, nobody cares. It's supposed to suck. Keep writing and finish it before you evaluate it.

If you've been editing and rewriting for a while and you're still stuck. Well, maybe it's time to go back to the drawing board.

I say you should probably just force yourself through it. In my experience, once I abandon a project, I have trouble getting back to it.

Alternatively, you could consider finding out where it went wrong and rewriting from that point. As for the two-dimensional characters, sit down and write out what you want them to be, then go back and sprinkle in those details throughout the book.

Darkwing said:

If I had a novel that seemed like a mess but could still have potential if I re-plotted it completely, then I'd re-plot it before writing anything more of it.
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If you suspect, however, that what's going on is not indeed a true mess but actually your inner evil critic sitting on your shoulder, then flick that critic away.

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Maryn said:

For me, if it's got gaping plot holes and characters who are two-dimensional at best, I'd stop and take the time to create a new master plan which corrects what I can now see as unsurvivable mistakes.

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Ditto these. For me personally, pushing through isn't going to improve matters. I don't plot well on the fly, and the prospect of revising a novel-sized mess just makes me freeze up. So the planning or re-planning is essential. It's really something you have to diagnose for yourself, though, and it may take trying a few different routes to see what works best for you.

I've been having a bit of that problem lately. It was just getting messy. I sat down and went over the basic structure and realized I could cut out two characters and four subplots.

In your case, maybe making a list of plot-holes and character issues would help to inspire ways to solve them. Don't give up though (unless you have a vast wealth of experience that tells you it's hopeless). My WIP has suffered from a billion and one holes, but finding and filling them has given me a work that, whatever its other flaws, is tightly plotted.

I just keep going. It's the only way it works for me. Also while right in the middle of the draft I can't judge how good or bad it is, I'm too close to it. Books I think are awful I read later and realise aren't so bad - and vice versa! I need to get it finished and leave it for a while before I can come back and judge it objectively.

I may of course do some tweaking to my outline for the rest of the story, and make notes about what I think will need to change later. But I keep on writing. Everything can be fixed in editing. Does it matter if your first draft is an unholy mess? The draft is is the messy bit that nobody else ever has to see. It's only one stage in the story production. Sometimes you have to get bits of the story wrong to figure out how to get them right later.

That's not to say I've never ever stopped working on one for a while when it stopped working. But even when I come back to it I don't start by rewriting the already written bit, I pick up as if that rewriting is already done and save the rewriting for the editing stage.

legendary bum said:

What do you do when you realize your manuscript is littered with plot holes, unexplored possibilities, shallow characterizations, etc.? Do you keep trucking, finish, and revise? Or do you go back and start over?

I know I should probably just keep going. But I really have trouble working on something that's such shit. Perhaps I should detach the "backspace" key from my keyboard. What methods do you guys use to silence the inner editor/perfectionist? The more extreme the better.

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I would come to a full stop, and plot out the novel again. Fill in the holes, and restart, with an eye on what you could reuse. I would plot it out visually, and play with it until your satisfied and won't have any questions about whether or not you should keep going.

I would take the time to figure out your main plot points/story architecture according to classic story structure, then work out a detailed story map. Then throw out what doesn't fit and start a revision.

My first manuscript was garbage. I was about two chapters away from finishing it when something in my head said to stop. I don't regret it though. I learned from it. I learned a lot. Turns out that about a month later I got a new idea and I'm about 2k words away from completing it. AND it's ten times better.

Moral of the story: It's not the end of the world if you trunk it. More than likely it's the beginning of another.

I see some folks actually do stop and fix. I'm impressed that you can ever finish if you let yourself do that. My standard is to finish at all costs, put the thing aside for a couple of weeks, reread and make editorial plans to revise, revise, proofread, send to beta readers, then take the beta readers' advice (or not), read aloud to my partner, proofing as I go, and then and only then do I call it finished.

But throughout that process there are days when I think the whole thing is garbage and that I am an idiot. Then there are days when I'm sure I'm a genius. So if you feel really despairing, maybe wait a while before you work on it again--a day, a week, a month--then go back and see if it's really as bad as you remember.

I'd finish it, then promptly ignore it for two months. Give yourself sometime to develop a fresh perspective. It might surprise you. This is what I did with my attempt at 2010 Nano. The book wasn't finished, but looking back on it, I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. I'm not sure how hardening that is for you right now, but there you go.

To me, plot holes fall in a different category than the other problems people are talking about. If there's a lot of bad writing on the sentence-by-sentence level, or there's weak characterization, or there's a poorly drawn setting, etc., then those are problems that can be fixed in revision. But if it's clear that the overall plot doesn't make sense, then I will have a very hard time moving forward and even finishing the first draft. So if I were running into a problem like that, I would go ahead and rewrite what I already have. I don't mean to try to polish it and get it looking like a final draft; I just mean to get it into shape so that there's a good plot throughline to follow for the rest of the book.

Different approaches work for different writers, so I'm not necessarily recommending that you do this yourself; it's just something to think about.