The Dreaded Rewrite

Ever notice how hard it is to regain your writing momentum when you've been away from a project for a while?  A successful author might not have this issue because they're probably used to the schedule set by their team (agent, editor, publisher, etc.) and so don't have huge gaps in their writing, but I noticed it recently.

I got married back in July and had been planning for the occasion for over a year.  Somewhere about six months before the wedding, I decided that my creative juices were primarily focused on the big "party," and the thought of being creative elsewhere seemed too taxing to my brain.

To be perfectly honest, that's also about the time that a particularly nasty bit of rewriting needed doing.  Some feedback I'd gotten suggested that I didn't have enough red herrings in my mystery, which I agreed with.  Unfortunately, this meant revising several scenes throughout the book and finding ways to throw my future readers off the scent of the true culprit.  I had started on the necessary changes, but soon discovered that it would take much more planning and thought than I'd originally hoped.  The hiatus for the wedding planning was a handy excuse.

Then after the wedding I had to plan out the honeymoon, which wasn't until the end of October.  And then, of course, came the holidays.  But fear not, I began revisions on the book at Chapter 1 shortly after we returned from Greece, so I didn't procrastinate too much longer, but I still dreaded that murky middle where the Red Herrings and the True Culprit threads wove closer together.  Several doubts plagued me at that time:  How would I have my protagonist hunt down and eliminate the Red Herrings?  When was it okay to let the audience see the True Culprit?

I'm a huge fan of the movie "Murder By Death," so, in deference, I didn't want to wait until the last minute to "introduce" the villain, but I also didn't want to make it so obvious that my readers would grow bored with the story after page 50; hence the need for the Red Herring.  Each chapter I got to led me closer and closer to this tangled mess I'd left behind over a year before, and with each chapter done, I felt a looming sense of dread.  Would I be able to pull this off?

A couple weeks ago, I finally got to the chapter where the real and perceived villains meshed, and I froze for a good 30 minutes, trying to think my way through it.  Eventually I just started typing and was successful in moving the story forward, but I now have to go back and polish it, not to mention the remaining chapters that still need to be rewritten.  There's still a lot of trepidation inside of me; especially since it's been so long since I'd been involved in this story.  I have to reconnect with my characters again, and remember how each one reacts to the situations they're in.

I'm sure every author had these same issues with their first full-length novel.  At least I hope so.  Because believing that Sue Grafton had to work through this gives me hope that I'll eventually figure it out, too.