Just Plain 'Break'

Not a hour after I penned yesterday's post on Monday afternoon, I slammed headfirst into a large and very painful brick wall. Okay, I had an ending to my book, I had large portions of the plot worked out, things came to a conclusion...

But it was a conclusion I hated. Somehow, the entire moral of the story morphed to: Don't kill innocents, but please do commit murder for revenge.

Don't know about you, but that's not exactly what I wanted out of this story. Not quite o.O And because of this now-twisted moral, the MC became someone I hated. How could she do this? All those morals she stood up for, all the right she fought for - she's just going to let it all go at the end and ignore everything? Um, excuse me?

I hated her. I fell into a bitter pit of despair, and was quite literally ready to rip the plot cards that lay on the floor in front of me up into little tiny shreds.

I didn't. See me be good.

See, this exact thing happened with the last novel: I had an idea of where I wanted to go with the novel, but the story became such that in order to get there, my protag had to turn into a Not Nice PersonTM. So I scrapped The Project, because with that story, I couldn't see my way out of it, and there wasn't enough else that was compelling about the story to make me want to try.

This time was different. This time it's Jess. I loved this story. And somewhere in there still was a kernel of the story I'd wanted to write - and I was determined to find it.

I spent the whole day being miserable, which was a great end to my long weekend, and didn't sleep much at all on Monday night. But sometime during my tossing and turnings, an answer came to me. I'm not going to plot-spoilerise here, but besides the fact that Jess's motivation for her 'final attack' at the climax has changed (yay, no more revenge attacks!), I can show you this.

This is what my novel currently looks like, as plotted out to the end:



The red and blue are the two MCs, and the pink and orange are the two subplots. As you can see, it's quite a mess - unbalanced, messy, and random.

Here's what I've realised (in a *facepalm* moment) what it ought to look like:



Doesn't that look much better?

So, after several heart-stopping, heart-wrenching, sleep-depriving hours on Monday afternoon, I think I can say I'm back on track, and raring to go again. I still need to finish the darn draft, which is as messy as the first diagram, which makes me want to tear my hair out, but I can at least now look forward to the pleasure of knowing what I need to fix in revision - and that nagging sense that something was wrong has finally left me, and I'm free to write. :)