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Welcome to Finishing Week 8. This is Elizabeth Stark in the Book Writing World. Today we are going to take a final look at Causality and Build in your book.
Throughout the process of writing and revising your book, you’ve been moving back and forth between intuition/ storytelling and architecture/ planning. Sometimes in the process of “fixing” your book, you may have moved whole sections or cut scenes or characters. You may have fragments or jumps now in the manuscript that you haven’t wanted to tackle. Sometimes you love a scene or an image and are reluctant to cut it even if it no longer works where it is. Sometimes you are so relieved at what worked about a big rearrangement of scenes that you forget to notice what isn’t quite working yet.
This week, take at look at the progression of your story and any problems with progression.
Let’s start with excesses. Are there places where the story logic doesn’t work? Are there any tangents at the level of story and sentence that need to be cut? Again, it is easy to get attached to a scene because you wrote it or because you like it or because it happened, but that doesn’t mean it belongs. This is the tough love moment for your about-to-leave-home book.
Now let’s turn to jumps or missing pieces. What is left to be done to connect the dots in your story? This doesn’t mean that you have to follow your characters from room to room, from moment to moment. It’s okay to deliberately jump from one key moment to another. Here you are looking for problems with the progression and build of your story. What doesn’t quite make sense? Perhaps the motivation is off, the build is off, or a question is unanswered for you, the writer, and you aren’t sure what to do. What have you been ignoring? This is the time to take it head on, wrestle it to the ground, look it in the face and make your final choices.
Pull together two complete lists: excesses and jumps. Really know what is left to fix on the path from here to done. Redoing your problem-solution list based on what is actually happening in the book can also clarify the progression of your story and make sure it is working.