Second Chances as a Science

It's summer for me now and honestly I have no idea what to do with myself. I don't miss classes or a hundred papers a week (well, maybe just ten), but I do need the structure and schedule that came along with school. My sleep schedule is screwed up--which is really bad, considering I'm an insomniac (I'm on hour 30 of no sleep right now!)--and so is my writing. I have 18 days left and I'm really not much further than I was a week ago, it's sad and scary. This whole writing thing was a lot easier in November.

The thing with edits is that you have a chance to make things better than they first were before anyone else sees them. It's your chance to polish up your novel and get rid of all the things you wouldn't want to get out into the world. At this point, if you're like me, you might discover that your story doesn't make as much sense as it should in the order it was written in, so you'll start moving things around. This can be good, this can be great! Or this could be a bad idea.

Sometimes, after you've rearranged things in all these new ways you look back at it and realize you only made it worse. Maybe what needed to be moved wasn't a chapter, but a scene, a paragraph, a sentence. Chapters can be broken down into smaller units and exchanged, they don't always have to move in giant blocks. I thought I had done so well with my new order of chapters, til I realized that Rob could talk with his mother about Risty, but it would make sense to wait until he knew Risty better. The part I had pushed behind this section hinged on a paragraph, not a chapter, and I shouldn't have moved everything to accommodate that small section.

Edits are for second chances, but also for experimentation. Edits are chemistry, essentially. You take different elements of the novel and combine them in new or unexpected ways, just to see what will happen. Sometimes you'll be granted with something fantastically superior to your original, sometimes it will blow up in your face. Your second chance experiments can make your novel better, but every now and again, you realize that what you started with is what was best, after all. My beginning outranks what I currently have, but I'm going to continue experimenting and hopefully find something that works. (Before my friend Casye throws me in a black hole like she's threatened if I don't meet my deadline).

EDIT: I lied, it really was better the new way. Or is it? I don't really know!