Having some trouble with the laser focus again.
As I lay in bed last night, mind spinning through major plot points and which details can be safely left out, I started to take a sharp left turn. Into rewrites for Something Beautiful. I’ve known since I finished the last draft of this book that I would need to rewrite it again before I could really begin submitting it. The one agent I submitted it to read the partial, and though she liked the voice, just couldn’t take it on. I was disappointed, but I also completely understood. For some reason, I just can’t seem to get this story out on paper as powerfully as it sits in my head.
But I had an idea. It’s told in two voices, a story within a story, where the mc is struggling with something in the present that is firmly tied into her understanding and dealing with a tragedy in her past. Flashback novels are admittedly a hard sell to begin with, they can be jarring to read, so the trick is making the flashbacks seamless. I work very hard at this, but incidentally I feel it’s not the flashbacks weakening the story. It’s the “present” conflict that’s just sorta meh.
In the first draft, the mc was 20-something. At that time, I wasn’t kidding myself that it was YA. It definitely wasn’t. I hadn’t even decided I wanted to write YA back then. All I knew was I really liked all the flashback scenes, but I wasn’t resounding with her 20-something voice. So in draft two, I made her older. Early 30’s. And whoa! That didn’t work at all. I barely got halfway through that draft before tossing it. Then for the 3rd draft, which I was writing as I was writing Intended, my first stab at a teen novel, I started asking myself, is SB a young adult novel, too? Is that my problem? But I thought my plot (problem, question, whatever you want to call that main idea) was dependent upon her not still being a teenager. So I made her younger, college aged now, and suddenly the conflict started feeling more rounded, more immediate, more frightening, more pertinent. I really started liking it! This is the draft sitting on my harddrive now. But even though I pitched it on a whim when asked for “something else” and got a request, I can’t help thinking it’s still really not ready for primetime.
I think this story has one more incarnation I need to try writing. I can finally imagine it truly a YA novel, and I think it’s going to work. Perfectly. I don’t know why I couldn’t imagine this to begin with, it makes so much sense. The hard part is going to be leaving it on the back burner while I finish the synopsis for Heart on Fire.
