Revision at a New Level

It’s time to get may book back out of the drawer where it’s been marinating while I research agents.  So after my critique group passes on their feedback about my manuscript, I’m about to dive back in for some rounds of intense revisions.  Going back to my first post of the year, I’m not going to be satisfied with something that’s acceptably good.  I want my writing to rise to a new level of quality –I want Sara-Zarr-Amazing, Gayle-Forman-Can’t-Get-It-Out-of-My-Head-Fantastic!  As a result, I’ve gotten a little obsessed this week about my favorite authors’ ever so casual references to their fourteenth draft, their twenty-first draft.  It makes me feel really naïve, but okay, I’ll say it.  What are they doing in all those drafts?  And how fast are they working?

(I’m guessing they’re not counting rewriting one scene as a whole draft.  I’m guessing a draft is like one whole pass through the thing working on a particular goal.)

I’ve done two drafts of my current novel.  (I know, Sara and Gayle, you’re shaking your heads.)  I’m over that thing where you think you’re close to finished, and then you realize, shoot, you are nowhere near the end.  And I know every writer and every book will require different kinds of attention.  But, in general, I want to know the kinds of things these stellar authors are tending to, and I Want To Do Them!

My fears.  First, I don’t work well checking off a list of eighty-two items that need to be fixed one by one.  I find by the time I get a few items into the list the remaining items have become moot.  I tend to work better in sweeping goals for each pass, goals that start broad with structure and narrow to character, pacing, and then line editing. 

Second, I sense I’ve got to let go of this fear of tearing the whole thing apart.  I remember how worried I was the last time I sat at my dining room table with one-hundred notecards that might or might not gel into a whole piece.  I have a deep-seeded fear that once I start tearing the thing apart it won’t go back together again.  I know this is kind of ridiculous because it’s all organically related and can certainly reconfigure itself naturally in many ways –the underlying thematic strings alone kind of guarantee that.  I think I’m afraid once I rip out a few chunks, I’ll start tearing it up into such tiny pieces that I’ll be left with a pile of shredded phrases keep me forever guessing, Should she toss her hair in Chapter 3 or Chapter 7?

So here’s my plan… please, tell me what you think.

March:

• Draw a picture (probably a web, like a mobile –see earlier post) of the book’s structure now.

• Analyze the cause-effect movement between the web’s pieces, and revise accordingly.

• Revise the pitch and query.

• Write a one, two, and five page synopsis.

• Write a chapter outline.

• Organize feedback from critique group.

April - May:

• Finish revision of chapter one so that it points right at the white hot center of the story, raises questions, and ensures the reader love the characters.

• Make a pass attending to just the white hot center and revise accordingly.

• Critique partners have pointed to things that need to happen earlier –make it so.

• Do a whole pass attending to just the pace of the two main characters’ relationship.

• During this whole month, start the writing day with free-writing on character issues that need to be deepened.  This includes (playfully) writing scenes that don’t yet appear in the manuscript.

June – July:

• Take a pass through the whole thing for each of the six main characters, each time focusing on BEING that person in that moment.

• Figure out how to revise for pacing.

• Attend to chapter-specific notes.

• This whole time start the writing day with free-writing on the more minor characters.

So am I headed in a productive direction?  What are some things you’ve attended to during later drafts?  And if you’ve gotten past ten drafts, I want to know what you’re doing!

Characters that Stay with You

            There are some books, they can’t be put down.  You close them, you leave them on your bedside table, but the characters get up and follow you through your day, that day, and the next.  This has been my experience with the characters in Gayle Forman’s If I Stay and Where She Went.  I am driving to pick up my daughter from school, I am worrying, and I realize it is about Adam.

            These characters that haunt you through your day, who seem real as living people you know, I want that for the characters in my novel.  They are like that sometimes, but maybe because I am a new writer, they fade into the background as I worry about things like chapters and structure, and the white hot center.  When I return to them for the next round of revisions, I want to think about what kind of attention do I need to give to a draft to invite my characters to this level of existence?

            So I looked back over Where She Went, which I finished last night, breathless.  Here’s what I noticed.

• Questions, Questions, Questions:  As I read, I was constantly asking –but will you get back together?  will you be friends?  what about the band, will you go back to it?  what about Bryn?  how will you find yourself in the wreckage?  will the music come alive for you again, what will you write next?  As Sara Zarrdiscusses in Hold on Loosely, Forman lets herself live inside these questions.  She lets herself be present in her characters so she can feel each question as it arises in Adam and the impact in has on him.

• Human Things the Characters Notice about Each Other:  There are small, very human, physical details the characters notice about each other, that breathed life into them for me…

…the way she wiped her hand on her skirt in between pieces, the way she cocked her head in time to some invisible orchestra, all gestures that are way too familiar to me

I didn’t really notice her until I saw her not playing.  She was just sitting in one of the soundproof practice booths, her cello resting gently against her knees, her bow poised a few inches above the bridge.  Her eyes were closed and her brow was a little furrowed.  She was so still, it seemed like she’d taken a brief vacation from her body.  And even though she wasn’t moving, even though her eyes were closed, I somehow knew that she was listening to music then, was grabbing the notes from the silence, like a squirrel gathering acorns for winter, before she got down to the business of playing. 

…her cheek still flushed from the night’s performance…

Her hair, long and dark, is down now, swimming damply against her bare shoulders, which are still milky white and covered with the constellation of freckles that I used to kiss.  The scar on her left shoulder, the one that used to be an angry red welt, is silvery pink now.

…the tiniest rebel teardrops…

I run my thumb over the calluses on her thumb and up and down the bony ridge of her knuckles and wrist.

• The Rightness of the Comparisons: Forman’s comparisons are fresh, they help me see in a new way, and they are so clearly the result of a writer listening to the vibe of her characters.

When the lights come up after the concert, I feel drained, lugubrious, as though my blood has been secreted out of me and replaced with tar.

The wind is whipping her hair this way and that so that she looks like some kind of mystical sorceress, beautiful, powerful, and scary at the same time.

It’s like I’m seeing Mia through a prism and she’s mostly the girl I knew but something has changed, the angles are off…

• The Characters Are So Completely in Their Own Bodies:  Adam and Mia live inside real bodies, real bodies that are easy to forget about when you’re focusing on dialogue or plot or theme.  I want to go back and take a whole pass over my manuscript just to let myself be in my characters’ bodies.  Some of my favorite Forman physical moments:

I wander into the back garden for my wake-up smoke.  I pat my pockets, but all I find there is my wallet, my sunglasses, the borrowed iPod, and the usual assortment of guitar picks that always seem to live on me.  I must have left my cigarettes on the bridge.

I have to mentally hold my arm in place to keep the trembling from turning into a jackhammer.

I have that floppy calm that follows a cry.

• Physiological Reactions the Characters Create in One Another: Attention is also paid to the reactions Adam and Mia set off in each other.  They’re not all positive, and they’re not all sexual, but I couldn’t resist these:

…I give the scar on her shoulder the slightest of kisses and feel arrows of heat shoot through every part of me.

…kiss her right behind her ear, the way that used to drive her crazy, the way that, judging by the sharp intake of breath and the nails that dig into my side, still does

She runs her hands through my hair and it’s like she electrocuted my scalp –if electrocution felt so good,

• The Interplay between the Characters’ Thoughts and Actual Speech:  So in addition to the physical, Forman gives Adam and Mia an inner life as well.  The tension that arises from the contrast between the wildly goings on inside Adam and what he actually said out loud had my heart pounding and the pages turning faster and faster.

Where did you go?  DO you ever think about me?  You’ve ruined me.  Are you okay?...A calm steals over me as I retreat from myself, pushing me into the background and letting that other person take over…. “Good concert”

Really, Adam, I thought.  Is that all you are going to say?  Don’t do it, don’t!  But I knew I would be doing the same thing.  I felt physical pain as I read this!

Yet Forman goes a step further.  She plays with the thought-speech dynamic to create a connection between Adam and Mia we cannot ignore:

Opposite directions, I think and am surprised when Mia actually says it out loud.  “Opposite directions.”

And then at the end, Adam breaks from his typical thought-speech pattern, making the moment is explosive.

“Really?  Was that how you quit me?”  And just like that, without thinking, without saying it in my head first, without arguing with myself for days, it’s out there.

It’s these things that have a physical reaction going in me as I read.  My husband caught me just after I’d closed the book and asked, “Are you okay?”  He could see it in my flushed cheeks, my breathlessness, my other-worldly stare.  Yes, I think, I’ve never been so okay.  I say, “Gayle Forman is my new hero.” 

I can just see Gayle pausing before she starts to write, her brow furrowed just like Mia, listening for Adam, collecting him.

What characters follow you around?  Share them and the titles and authors with us.  Beyond a certain je ne sais quoi, how do you think the author conjures them?  How do you?

Pitches...Ahhh!

Hands down, the absolute worst question a person can ask me is, “So what is your book about?”  And hey, it’s a fair question!  I mean, it’s what I’d want to know.  And yet for years I have cringed even before the question is asked.  I see it coming, and my brain begins to shut down!  As a writer I should actually have a pretty thought-provoking, articulate way to express what I’m writing about.  Yet this question signals a wad of grey, cotton-flavored gum to materialize in my mouth and grow to enormous size.  I have no words, I have no breath, I fear I look like an idiot.

I did, however, come up with a disclaimer that I’ve used for the last year or so.  I say, “Believe it or not, that is the hardest question for all writers to answer.  I actually don’t talk about what I’m working on until it’s finished because I find that drains the energy out of it.”  That’s all true.  I leave out the part about how most of us are actually writing in order to find out what our story is about.  Feel free to use my disclaimer until you figure it out!

Meanwhile, in private I’ve kept a secret Word document that has grown to 8 single-spaced pages where I practice writing my pitch –that elusive one sentence summary of my story.  It includes clusters of key words, dictionary definitions, lists of descriptors I cannot use because time and politicians have ruined these words for me –words like maverick.  Additionally, in my journal I often write about my story.  After reading Sarah Zarr’s essay Hold on Loosely at Hunger Mountain, I wrote for pages about The Question my first chapter raises about the white hot center of my story.  I made a few discoveries, circled them, and they found their way into my Pitch Document.

The other day, I think I got it!  No kidding!  I think I got my pitch.  (Dance of celebration!)  I wrote it down, and I felt a physical ZING through the marrow of my bones.  Here’s how it happened.  While my manuscript is out to some readers, I was working on a query letter –which necessitates working on a pitch, and I learned two things.

First, in his publication How to Write a Great Query Letter, Noah Lukeman boiled it down to the bare bones for me. 

USE:                                          AVOID:

• SPECIFICS                             • NAMES

• LOCATION                              • SUB-PLOTS

• TIME PERIOD

• COMPARISON to

another book or character

He also suggested writing a one-sentence version, as well as, several other expanded versions –three sentences, five sentences, a paragraph summary, a page summary, all of which have different uses.  But if you can write the one-sentence version it straightens out your priorities, and the expanded versions get easier.  That just helped me focus!  Thank you, Noah!  I needed that.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  I could do those things.  The hardest was sticking to the white hot center and avoiding the subplots.

            The second thing that helped was a trip over to the awesome YA Highway site, where if you click on Agents and Editors you can read published authors’ query letters that worked, as well as, the author and agent’s comment on why!  So I was reading Kirsten Hubbard’s query to Michelle Andelman and Michelle’s analysis.  Right off, the letter broke a lot of Noah Lukeman’s rules, but Kirsten had the bare bones of what Lukeman asked for, and I don’t think the letter would have worked without them.  What sparked my own personal epiphany was reading Kirsten’s letter sentence by sentence, stopping at each period to consider what I would say for my own story.  I read: Grace Carpenter longs to stand out, and it sent me directly into my character’s white hot center.

            Now I don’t think I could have arrived at my pitch without:

1)    practicing pitches even when I was still drafting

2)    writing about my story

3)    focusing on Lukeman’s bare bones

4)    or chasing down the marrow of the story like Kirsten Hubbard.

The biggest benefit?  Honing my pitch has inspired the absolute best revisions of my manuscript –especially chapter one.  I feel like everything I write now has something to aim at!

So what did I finally come up with?  Click on my Works in Progress link to see!  I’d love to know what you think and how your pitches are coming along!  As for me, next time someone asks me what I’m writing about, I’m going to try out my pitch!  (Nervous!)  I’ll let you know how it goes!

Causality & Chapters

             So that was nice, using the mobile metaphor to take one thing at a time in my first chapter.  It really worked, but sometimes all my over-analysis of how a story’s working can rein things in so tightly the story doesn’t get a chance to run.  So I have to swing back and forth from one metaphor to another depending on what my story needs.  Mapping mobiles and covering my dining room table with color-coded indexes cards helped me get a handle on things.

            However, I’m feeling uncomfortable about the way I ended up dividing my story into chapters.  I ended up with ten, long chapters that group elements of my story thematically –Emergency, Boundaries, Mothers, etc.  For a while that was working for me; it helped me see how theme was holding the story together.  But readers confirmed my nagging fear that these hulking chapters are not agile enough.  They are beautiful and they make an aesthetic mobile, and for a while they really helped me, but when it comes down to it I need to loosen the reins and let the forward motion of the story carry it forward. 

What I’m getting at is what makes a story a story is that is moves forward.  Each thing that happens causes the next thing, or it should.  Even if I build a beautiful mobile, at some point, I have to hang it up and let the wind blow through it.

            I remember one of my best writing teachers saying, a poem is not an essay.  And as prettily as I can structure a story, it is not a poem.  A story has to move forward.  As E. M. Forster memorably put it: if we write, “The king died, and the queen died,” we have a narrative, but if we write instead, “The king died and the queen died of grief,” then we have a plot.

            Right now, I’m reading Laini Taylor’s new book, Daughter of Smoke and Bone.  I am literally propelled through the story.  Her chapters are fairly short, they’re lean and nimble, each chapter causes the next one.  And though Laini titles each with a meaningful phrase from that chapter, she merely numbers the chapters and lets the story go as it must.  She has 60 chapters.  Sixty!  How freeing!  (She also groups her chapters into three or four large sections, the way you would group scenes in a play into the major acts.  She does this by slipping in a page with a changing refrain to introduce each act.)  But by and large, she lets each scene emerge from the one before, and I turn the pages like I’m slapping the story-horse I’m riding to go, go, go as fast as it can!

            So I am inspired to loosen my reins on this next draft.  Now that I understand the structure of my story (thanks to mobiles), I’m going to try something different.  Instead of guiding my horse through a tightly designed equestrian jumping course, I’m going to loosen the reins and just let the story run, run, run.  One short chapter causing the next.  Yee-hah!

            Are you still struggling with chapter division and its effect on the story?  I’d love to here what you’re trying!

Mobiles

            So while I was studying my Sara Zarr books, I made another great discovery –Hunger Mountain, Vermont College of Fine Arts’ journal, and it includes a rich section for Young Adult Literature.  This is where I read Lindsey Lane’s essay, Out on the Bendy Branches.  In this essay, Lane compares stories to Alexander Calder’s mobiles.  She says:

I started to see a correlation between scenes dancing on a fulcrum, balanced, telling a story, casting shadows, catching light, moving, resting and moving again. The pieces and shapes of a mobile have to be perfectly balanced as they move in concert and opposition, suspended at varying lengths from the spine, the arc of the story.

That’s what Sara Zarr’s doing, I thought!

            My overriding impression when I started How to Save a Life was that she was laying her story down one piece at a time.  Whereas the feedback I’d gotten on my own first chapter was: You’re stuffing so much in here I can’t figure it out and get my bearings, with Sara, I really had a sense of being able to take in one thing at a time.  First, there is Jill asking, “Who am I without my Dad?”  Then Jill goes into what’s hard about living without her Dad.  Out of that she pulls that the hardest thing is loving her mom, in particular understanding her.  Then she arrives finally at the specific challenge of understanding her mother’s decision to adopt, and we land in the train station waiting for the birthmother with Jill and her mom.  One piece at a time, like the pieces on a mobile.

            As I read, I was aware of each piece in relationship to the others, but Sara allowed me to be present in each moment without author anxiety about showing me right away how it was all going to fit together.  That’s what I was doing in my chapter one –rushing in and confusing the readers with too much before they even had all the pieces.

            There was another benefit to this.  The pages were never overwritten.  Because Sara is just laying down one piece of her mobile at a time without stopping to explain connective tissue, she gives the writing lift and forward motion.  As Lane explains:

I thought about how much these writers leave off the page—but what they do leave on the page shows us enough that the world is created and the heart of the story beats….The overall arc is there. The voice. The characters. Even the back-stories are there. But there isn’t a lot of connective tissue. There isn’t a lot of telling. The reader supplies it. The reader actually holds the story as a whole. Each scene makes sense on its own and within the context of the whole but it allows the reader to make leaps.

What’s left off the page raises questions that propel me, the reader, forward.

And so I imagined Sara Zarr building her chapter one like a mobile.  I actually drew it out:

Suddenly, I was getting very excited about my first chapter again.  I could do it this way, I thought.  Though a tapestry with different threads running through it is sometimes a useful metaphor for me, the mobile metaphor appealed.  I get easily lost in a tangle of threads, but I could build a mobile.  And for chapter one, I just have to introduce one major branch of the mobile and the pieces that dangle from it, one at a time.  They move, they pick up the light, their shapes and colors harken to other branches of the mobile with which they are in balance, but for chapter one, I just have to build this one branch.  I think in pictures so after I meditated on some different places to start in the marrow, I picked one and started sketching.

Consider drawing your story as a mobile.  It just may be a useful mapping strategy!  Let me know how it goes!

Beginnings: Starting in the Marrow

            So I have this second draft that is coming back from readers with feedback, and consistently they are saying something is not right with the first chapter.  Surprise, surprise… the infamous first chapter.  Is there anything harder to write?  My writing partners’ comments include things like:

1)    The writing in the second and third chapters is SO much better than the first chapter.

2)    The pace really picks up after the first chapter.

3)    I just couldn’t get a visual on the first personal narrator in Chapter One.

4)    You were establishing so many new things in Chapter One that I couldn’t get my bearings.

Yeah.  So back to Sara Zarr for another one-on-one lesson with me and my copies of all her books!  Here’s one thing I figured out.

            (Caveat: I’m skipping over her prologues here… prologues are a whole other issue!)

            The opening scenes of Sara Zarr’s books start right in on the central problem at the white hot center of the story.  She doesn’t work up to it.  She doesn’t foreshadow it with a smaller version of the problem. She goes directly to it:

            How to Save a Life:

                        Dad would want me to be here.

            There’s no other explanation for my presence.  Sometimes it’s like I exist –keep going to school, keeping coming home, keep showing up in my life –only to prove that his confidence in me, his affection for me, weren’t mistakes.  That I’m the person he always said I was.  Am.  That I know the right things to do and will always do them in the end, even if it takes me a while to get there and even if I fight the whole way.

She starts right in the marrow of Jill’s problem.  It would be so easy to get lost in the circumstances of Jill’s mother adopting a baby after losing Jill’s dad, but Sara starts in the marrow.

Sweethearts:

There are things I want to remember about Cameron Quick that I can’t entirely….  He’s a story I want to know from page one.

            My brain doesn’t seem to work that way.  Most specific things about Cameron are fuzzy…. But when it comes to Cameron I always want more than I have, would like to be able to take hold of at least one or two more pieces, if only because I’m convinced there are parts of myself hidden inside them.

You can easily get lost in the mesmerizing details about Cameron that I left out with the elipses, but Sara directs all of them right toward Jenna’s need to reclaim these old pieces of herself.

Story of a Girl:

Okay, Story of a Girl has my favorite opening of all times, and I have to say, Sara wows me with both her prologue and her chapter one so here is a little from each:

Prologue:

            I was thirteen when my dad caught me with Tommy Webber in the back of Tommy’s Buick, parked next to the old Chart House down in Montara at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night.  Tommy was seventeen and the supposed friend of my brother, Darren.

That’s her battle right there –is she this story?  Can she break through to her dad now?

Chapter One:

            They made us clean out our lockers on the last day of sophomore year….The only stuff I kept was from Honors English.  I would deny this is asked, but I thought I might want to read some of my essays again.  There’s this one from when we read Lord of the Flies.  I really got into it, the savagery and survival-of-the-fittest stuff.  A lot of kids in my class didn’t get it….

            Then Caitlin Spinelli was all, “Yeah, didn’t they know their chances for survival were, like so much better if they worked together?”

            Hello!  Walk down the halls of your own school for three seconds, Spinelli: we are savages.  There is no putting of the heads together to come up with a better way.  There is no sharing of the bounty with those less fortunate.  There is no pulling the dead weight so that we can all make it to the finish line.  At least not for me….

            Anyway, Mr. North wrote on my essay…

            Deanna, he wrote, you clearly have much of importance to say.

And at the heart, in the marrow, that’s what the story’s about.  Are we just savages?  Can Deanna find something more?

When I've got nothing, literally nothing, no draft or anything, I know I need to just start somewhere.  But when I’m staring at another blank screen, ready to write draft three of Chapter One (or to be honest draft eleven because I’ve written this chapter so many more times) and all those threads of the story are lying out there, it’s so easy to be tempted to just pick up the obvious one --the concrete circumstantial hook.  Let’s get started, let’s fill the reader in on everything that’s going on.  But Sara Zarr reminds me to be patient and take my time choosing.  Which thread runs right through the marrow of the story?  Pick that one up.  Start there.  Let the rest weave in around that.

Of course, then it’s time to start brainstorming the infinite scenes that could embody that marrow, right?  At least my brainstorming doesn’t feel so random.  I’ve got a purpose, and that puts just enough pressure on my brainstorming that the more vivid scene ideas start coming faster.

Threads

Sometimes the idea of holding an entire novel in my head seems overwhelming.  If my draft-three novel were a tapestry, I just know there would be a lot of dropped threads and holes!  So when I’m reading some of my favorite YA authors, I marvel at how intricately each story thread is woven through.  They know just when to go back and let us know how the relationship with that supporting character is going.  They know just where to pull an old thread into the scene I’m reading.  They leave me breathless… beautiful how they tied that in right there!  And, sometimes, they leave me doubtful that in my own story I could ever possibly remember to pull the subtler threads through and tie them in at just the right spots.  So, I did what I usually do in these cases.  I took my latest favorite –Sara Zarr’s How to Save a Life, and I studied it, closely!

            First I took two days to reread the novel.  As I read I took notes.  For each chapter I jotted down in order the major events.  Admittedly, this was a little tedious.  I would never want to do this on a first read.  But it gave me so much good data to work with, and it made it very easy to flip back through the story and study it.  Warning: spoilers ahead!

            Second, I reviewed my notes and jotted down what I saw as the major threads.  Here’s what I came up with:

            Jill                               Jill & Mandy                                                  Mandy           

                                                adoption

loss of dad                                                                        baby’s father?/pain from abuse

                                    relationship with mother

                                    (trust/home/family)

Dylan & Ravi                                                                                       Christopher & Kent

                                    who she will be

                                    (relationship with each other)

Then, I literally went back through my notes shading them with colored pencils to color code these threads.  Here’s an example of what my notes look like for one of Mandy’s chapters:

Mandy:           While buttering toast, Mandy recalls mother’s incessant talking,

her need to breathe, and Robin’s e-mail

                        She thinks, Maybe I could be a mother.

                        She tells Dylan about her missing father & her mother

                        Dylan tells her, Your mom got a lot too = me, Mandy!

            Here’s what I learned.

            In interviews of some of my favorite authors, they refer to the 13^th draft, the 20^th, and I’ve thought, What on earth are they going over so many times?  After this exercise, I could totally see how it would be VERY useful to take an entire pass over the novel for each thread or character.  It really is too much to hold in my head otherwise!  What I think I will do is chart the threads in my own manuscript as I did with Sara Zarr’s novel.  Then, I will take a day to read through it pretty fast looking at just one of my threads.  I will be asking myself questions like:

1) Where do I see opportunities to weave that thread back in,

     in order to deepen the story’s meaning?

2) Where do I need to slow down and explore this thread more?

3) Is the development of this thread moving along fast enough?

Then I’m going to go back to he beginning and do it all over again for the next thread, and so on.

Something else I noticed about threads: when I was color coding, there were some events in the story that just couldn’t be considered one thread, no matter how I looked at it.  For example, at one point Ravi gets Jill to open up about how she’s doing with the death of her dad and Jill ends up totally insulting him.  On the surface, this could look like a Ravi thread.  A closer look tells me this is more to do with Jill’s loss of her dad, but it also has a lot to do with the kind of person she wants to be.  Those three threads just can’t be separated here.  What this taught me: the threads affect each other.  If the story is working, at some points the threads become so intertwined that they cannot be extricated from each other.  It reminded me that, when I do these passes over my manuscript, I can be looking for opportunities where one thread has an impact on the others.  It’s something I knew, but when I tear things apart to see how they work, it’s nice to see the bits naturally returning to the organic whole.  It’s nice to know that intertwining threads may be a sign my story is deepening.  It’s also a good reminder that sub-plots which don’t affect the central conflict need to go.

I kind of hate the idea of picking apart some of my favorite novels like this, but at the same time it’s like opening up a watch and discovering how the clockworks function inside.  The clockworks are their own kind of artistry.  In a way, understanding them makes these stories even more beautiful.  And the big bonus –it’s helping me fine tune the machinery of my own story!