Low Points in Writing Today

Low points in writing today. This weekend I spent some idle time compiling the table of contents for Black Hole Son - a list of which scene is currently where. It looks so jumbled it seems hopeless. The pacing looks completely off. Some scenes need to be combined, some need to be rearranged. I've already moved up one of Character B's scenes a day because I needed some more filler so Character A didn't consume the whole time. That's the problem, sometimes Character A consumes everything, sometimes Character B does, but it's so disjointed that it's uneven, and I'm afraid the reader won't know that he/she is supposed to pay attention to things evenly. Things look out of place, plots look incoherent. It looks like a lot of work, so complex, and looking at this big list, I don't know if I can arrange everything to make a good novel. A publishable novel. It makes me depressed.

But then I've got to remind myself that the novel is not seen in the big picture. It's seen in sentence by sentence, word by word, and that's the way I've got to revise it. Not in sweeping changes that move scenes around without a semblance of the forest for the trees. What I should do is just keep revising, and not start rearranging things that are days ahead before I get to them. I have to be with the characters here and now and how they experience things, before I decide they need to experience things sooner. I have to keep chugging along, and let those decisions appear when they need to, or I'll never finish. It would look too intimidating.

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