A Cautionary Tale

[swan_tower]

If it should ever happen to any of you that you come up with an idea for a novel when you're seventeen, write the novel when you're eighteen, pull something of a strange point of view trick in it, shop it around for a while, thoroughly rewrite it when you're twenty-one but leave the strange point of view trick in, shop it around some more, sell a different novel and its sequel, come back to the aforementioned novel with its strange point of view trick, and realize that the only way to make the strange point of view trick work is to give one of the characters more point of view scenes earlier in the novel, be warned: this is what you'll end up with on your library floor.

I'm hoping that having the entire bloody novel laid out, chapter by chapter and scene by scene, in visual format, will help me figure out where I can arrange for the necessary scenes. Because there's graven in stone, and then there's what this novel is in my head.

And don't even get me started on the need for a new title.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Making those index cards was tedious in the extreme. It did help me, though, figure out which scenes were amenable to being rewritten in the other pov. I've got about half a dozen candidates now, though I expect I'll only use four of them at the most. What I don't have yet is more than one possibility for new scenes from that pov.