If your plot has careened out of control and you're staring at what seems like a huge mess, you might be starting to wonder if it's even salvageable.
Perhaps:
- You've got way too much plot for a novel, and if you carry on, you're going to have a 200,000 blockbuster (in a genre where that really wouldn't work).
- You've got nowhere near enough plot for a novel, and you're almost finished ... 18,000 words in.
- You novel has a seriously "saggy middle" problem, where nothing much happens, or where you end up constantly retreading the same narrative ground.
- You thought your story was about one thing when you started, but now you're halfway through, it's become obvious that a lot needs to change.
- You had a perfectly good direction for your characters to go in ... but they decided to hare off on a huge detour and you have no idea how to bring them back to the main path of the plot.
If anything like this has happened to you, please don't despair! And please don't think that the problem is with you or your writing ability. Novels are big, complex, messy projects to attempt. It's completely normal (even if you've successfully written a novel before!) to find yourself staring at a huge mass of only semi-coherent text. Trust me, it happens to me, more than I'd like to admit.
The solution isn't to chuck the whole thing away, though it can definitely help to take a proper break, so you can come back and assess the state of your novel a bit more objectively.
Nothing is unsalvageable.
Because my first drafts are always a mess, I tend to redraft by completely starting over from scratch, with a blank page. Of course, a lot of the scenes I wrote stay in ... but plenty of stuff changes too (especially the tentative first few chapters and slow/clunky bits in the middle of the novel).
That might work for you, too.
Some other options to consider are:
- Rethinking the form your project takes. I've written short stories that eventually became novels, for instance. If your story idea doesn't fit its container well, then change the container! Novellas have become much more popular in the e-publishing age, so short novels aren't out altogether. Short story cycles (linked short stories) can also potentially work well. A too-long novel might have a subplot that could
be removed and used in something else.
- Adding more complexity and conflict. If your plot problem is, essentially, that you don't have enough of it, then look at ways to enrich your story. This doesn't mean chucking stuff in for the sake of it ... but considering how an additional subplot or a more extensive conflict could deepen your themes and characterisation.
Don't give up on your novel (or short story, or novella) because the plot's gone off the rails. Instead, take a break, get some distance, and look at how you could reshape the story – even if that means changing or revisiting your initial vision for it.
