Saturday, June 15, 2013

The Cornerstone of a Novel- The Idea

It's weird. I just finished what I had thought would be my final edit to my second novel, only to find out something: The storyline doesn't make sense. It probably isn't going to sell.

Of course it's odd to go through so many drafts and then finally stumble upon something that was so basic at the very end of things, but really, that is what happened. And for some reason, I find that no matter which place you tend to seek writing advice from, they always seem to give the style of writing more importance than the story itself. Just because your sentences sound nice and merge well together really means nothing if what you've written about is bad.

Of course, I think that I can use a bit of my manuscript. But I'll have to rewrite at least 60%. I'm not even so sure about the ending/storyline at this point. But at the very least, there's always that chance to try again.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, people will talk about sentence structure and the like. But has anyone actually read the entire ms? It would be kind of hard to comment on it and give you content-related suggestions otherwise. Of course, chapters function similar to short stories, and people can sometimes provide relevant comments on them.

    You're on AW. You have used SYW, right? It could be the critters who usually comment on that sort have weren't around at the time....

    Anyway, I wish you luck in your writing, and hope I get to read some.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I understand all of that, but now that I really look back at the whole thing, I'm suddenly having a whole lot of second thoughts. The whole thing was done rather quickly and haphazardly. Not only that, there's been this new idea that's come to me that I'm just itching to try out.

    ReplyDelete