I saw The Boy and The Heron a couple days ago, and it was really good. One of the things that impressed me the most was how much Miyazaki managed to cram into this film. It felt like a true adventure, with new things around every corner for the protagonist to explore and situations that happened one after another to lead the protagonist on his journey. I have no idea how Miyazaki managed to come up with so many seemingly random ideas, and then put them all together into a plot that was not only cohesive, but beautiful. With The Boy and The Heron still in mind, plus some creative juice I got yesterday, I took a look at my novel.

Fun fact: Once upon a time, my main motivation for creating this blog was to chronicle the ups and downs of my novel writing process.

I always considered my novel to be the first book in a saga. I wasn’t sure how long the saga would be; At first I thought four books, then settled on two. My last completed draft (back in November 2020) was over 100k words. I tweaked things here and there for a bit, but then I overhauled it with heavy edits. It could almost be considered a rewrite. I lifted large chunks from the original manuscript as I went through it, and the work was going at a steady pace, until I hit the midpoint. Everything seemed to slow down there, like swimming in Jello.

It should have been easy. I had this big finale planned, and then a final chapter tying up a few things, ending with a cliffhanger to hook the reader onto the second novel in the series. All I had to do was connect the scenes in my head in a way that made them possible. These two characters need to develop this kind of relationship so that by this point they know each other well enough to understand the subtext of this conversation. Things like that. But I dunno, it wasn’t flowing. So I stopped. 

As soon as I couldn’t buy the next plot point in my manuscript as a reader, I stopped copying things over. I did some reworking and rewriting of the last plot point I kept, but mostly I let it rest. It’s been resting for two and a half years. I had other things going on, and my novel just wasn’t a priority for me. Besides, every time I opened it up, I was faced with a mere 50k words of an unfinished manuscript that is almost as old as I was when I started it. What are its chances of making it into the big bad world of books anyway? Much less making any kind of mark out there? Perhaps I was wasting my life away on a book that just wasn’t meant for publication. Maybe it served its purpose as a means of improving my writing skill so that I could take on a different idea and write a different novel to be my debut. Maybe I needed to quit.

But I’ve been writing this book for so long that I don’t know how to stop anymore. Every so often I’d go in and add a few paragraphs, maybe a page here and there, rewrite a scene, edit a chapter, while avoiding the fact that I don’t have enough runway to land the ending. I came up with these ideas when I was a worse writer than I am now, and I’m calling myself out on the bullshit. I was just trying to run out the clock in my story and had my characters doing things to further character development, or relationships, or world building, rather than because that’s what the character would absolutely do under those circumstances, while managing to further multiple things at once. Every scene in my book shouldn’t just connect one plot point to the next; they should lead into each other in a way that is undeniable. Inescapable. Not just that, but I need to up the pace. The reader should feel an urgency that compels them to turn the page. They should be fighting the desire to glance ahead, and be surprised by what they see there.

Of course, this is all easier said than done, but I think I have an idea. How do I deal with a novel that slows so substantially in the second half that I cut it entirely and ignored it for 2.5 years? How do I get the characters to where I need them so that the events of the next book can happen? Perhaps I can fix both of these problems with a single solution.

It needs to all be one book.

P.S. I think I’m gonna go back to writing longhand for a little while, if only so that I can work on it anywhere, anytime. Also, I miss using nice pens.

Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash