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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48033
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48033
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

This is the first ever draft of your first ever novel. If you were able to simply pick up where you left off and bring it to a successful conclusion, you would be a phenom.

The novel is a highly complex construct. The complexity may not be apparent when you read a good novel that works well. (As in so many things, when it is done well, it looks easy, but it's not!) When you start to write one, however, you begin to discover just how complex it is. Discovery writing and plotting are two different responses to the complexity of the task, but neither of them is a complete solution.

The fundamental thing that you have to do in a novel is maintain tension continually over a work that can take between 6 hours and a day or more to read. Tension is that sense that something interesting could happen to someone you care about. It is like watching your kid's first recital. They could screw up, and if so they will be devastated and you will have to spend weeks comforting them and trying to rebuild their self confidence. Or they could play the piece flawlessly and bask in the applause. That's the feeling you need to give your readers on every page.

The problem is, you don't have the same tension at your kid's eighth recital as you do at their first. Yes, technically, the same stuff could happen, but the highs and lows are not as extreme. You will probably spend most of the time in the back row covertly checking your phone.

So, to maintain tension, you have to up the ante. You have to get from a grade school recital to a Juilliard audition if you want to create the same level of tension.

But the problem of getting your kid to the Juilliard recital is that life if full of distractions. Such is the problem for the discovery writer. All of those distractions can hold the interest for a while. But sooner of later interest will lag again. By the time you have gone to first recital, first soccer game, first science fair, first dance, etc, the tension in the next first just isn't there. So then you have to get back on the track to Juilliard. Except now you have all these other threads that don't have anything to do with Juilliard. They have lost their inherent interest and to pursue them further would simply take attention from Juilliard. But to drop them without any resolution seems lame.

For the plotter, on the other hand, the danger is that there are not enough distractions. The kid aces every audition, gets into Juilliard, graduates top of the class, and becomes the next Leonard Bernstein. But there is no tension because it is all too easy. To create and sustain tension, there needs to be a rival that has its own arc of tension, that could derail the Juilliard career. (How many times have we seen this movie: boyfriend/girlfriend vs. career.)

So, yes, you probably need to throw away a bunch of your subplots, focus on creating rising tension by both upping the stakes and creating a credible rival. And no, you probably shouldn't post chapters on social media as you go, because you may have to throw some or all of that stuff away, perhaps more than once.

Original score: 5