Saturday, July 24, 2010

Friendly Feedback

It's a wonderful thing when you have talented friends. Friends whose feedback you value and respect, who happen to give really great advice. I have several such friends and count myself very lucky. The latest gave me some extremely sound advice on my novel.
     The story is there, the characters are there, it doesn't even sag. However, the order is wrong on some things. The actual conflict isn't stated until too late into the novel. We don't know who the antagonist is until too late. And belief occurs too quickly.
     So, I will treat my novel like a jigsaw puzzle. I will chop it up and rearrange the pieces until they fit back together in ways that absorb and inform the reader at a proper rate.
     And then I will go back through and polish, polish, polish. That's actually the hard part because things get so jumbled in my head - it's tricky to keep it all straight. But this is what I must do to make the novel the absolutely best it can be before I send it to my agent. It's already been a TON of work, but there's still a bit more to get to the gate. (We haven't even made it to the race yet!)