What do you do when, halfway through the book you’re writing, you realize it needs to be completely rebuilt? More importantly, how do you figure this out in the first place? This podcast came about as a result of a question from a listener, but the question was specific to “what if you find out it’s too derivative?” As it turns out, that’s just one of the many problems you can discover midway through a novel.

We spend the first half of the cast discussing how each of us identify the showstopping problems that require us to overhaul our works.

We then talk about the process of fixing things that might, at first glance, appear to be completely unfixable. Sometimes we shift pieces of paper around, sometimes we push blocks of text around in our word processors, and sometimes we have to do something really significant, like adding an entirely new character or point-of-view.

One of the best features of this particular ‘cast is the bit in the second half where Howard and Dan grill Brandon about his process for Towers of Midnight. Wheel of Time fans won’t find any spoilers, but they’ll certainly gain some insight.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Warded Man, by Peter V. Brett, which Howard loves because of the “stand-up-and-cheer” moments of heroism throughout the book.

Writing Prompt: Take something you’ve already written, grab a throwaway concept in that story, and rewrite that scene or chapter so the throwaway bit is now the major focus.

Moment of Extreme Hubris: “I give lessons.” Listen for it.

That Episode on Stealing for Fun and Profit: Right here.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: If you are a new writer, just keep writing! Writing group, editor, agent, your own judgment will usually tell you when a book needs work. Identifying that something is wrong and learning writing triage to pick the right thing to fix take lots of practice. Some possible solutions: rearranging things, adding characters or scenes, removing characters or scenes, changing the setting… You can’t do everything in one draft — focus on fixing certain things.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 27, major overhauls to broken stories.
[Howard] 16 and a half minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And we have 90 seconds of advertising in the middle.
[Brandon] I can’t believe you actually used that. I’m sorry, audible.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Dan] It’s because I need an iPad.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Howard] And Dan needs an iPad. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by selling out.
[Dan] Is this the point at which we start over?
[Brandon] No, I think we just keep going.
[Howard] No, I think we’re fine, because I have a book that I really like that I’m going to pitch.
[Dan] Excellent.

[Brandon] Excellent. All right. Major overhauls. This started as a podcast where we were talking about… someone asked us what to do when they realized halfway through their book that it was incredibly derivative. Our answer to that was essentially, well, go look at our podcast which talks about how to steal like a thief and not get caught or make it an homage. But it started us talking about this idea of major overhauls. This is one of the hard things to learn as a writer. I’ve had to do it on several books. Dan just did it on a book. Dan, how did you know that the book needed a major overhaul?
[Dan] Well, because I have a very good writing group. I ran it through this group, and they got to the ending and said, “What? That’s how it ends?” At which point I said, “Aha! This ending is not working. The proper things have not been set up so that they don’t pay off right. The mysteries have not been properly revealed or solved…”
[Brandon] Okay. So it was alpha readers who let you know…
[Dan] Yes.
[Brandon] That it was broken. Have you ever just known, halfway through a book?
[Dan] Actually, to be fair, I did know that this one was broken going in. Which is why I kept it to the writing group. Usually I’ll send it out to many other alpha readers. In this one, I said I know what the problems are. I’m waiting for the writing group to tell me how to fix them.

[Brandon] Howard? How do you recognize when something’s broken? For you, fixing it is very different.
[Howard] First of all, I have a much shorter time to market on what I write and what you read. So if an overall story is broken, I’ve just failed in the magical performance art that is…
[Brandon] No, have you ever realized halfway through?
[Howard] No, I have realized halfway… three quarters of the way through a story that the plan I have is now going to fail if I attempt to execute on it because…
[Brandon] Right.
[Howard] Things have changed. For me, I have to go back and I have to look at what I have delivered, because everything I’ve already delivered has art attached to it, and I’m not going to redraw anything because I’m lazy.
[Brandon] Or in some cases, it may already have been on screen.
[Howard] Oh, it’s aired. I’m not going to retcon the archives. So I will look very carefully at what has already aired, and find a way to make that work. Sometimes that means overhauling the ending, sometimes it means just going through and looking at all the things that could possibly represent a promise made to the readers… whether or not I thought it was a promise at the time… and find a way to tie that into a new ending.
[Brandon] Do you rely on reader reaction for that [garbled]
[Howard] Lately I’ve started relying on… I’ve got a writing group. I will take them through the whole… the first two thirds of the book, and then say, “All right, help me identify reader promises. Tell me what sorts of things would excite you, what sort of things would disappoint you in an ending.” Then I’m just going to sit down and write it, because I’m not far enough ahead to hand them that yet.
[Brandon] That’s really fascinating to me because you’re in this special situation where essentially you’ve got half of it down and so you’ve got to rewrite what comes after that to make it work.
[Howard] Special situations…
[Brandon] See, and I usually am going back and fixing the beginning to make the ending I want to work still work.
[Howard] Obligatory luxury.
[Brandon] See, I’ve… um… you know, I don’t… um…
[Howard] I wish I could do that, but I can’t.

[Brandon] When I’ve noticed big things being wrong, it’s been one of several things. Either it’s come from my editor or agent. Generally they get a finger on it. The writing group has generally… there’s only been one or two instances I can think of where major overhauls have been noticed by the writing group first. That’s generally because my books are so enormously huge that it takes forever to get through a writing group with one. So alpha readers are getting back to me first. With me, it’s generally… I’m noticing it on my own as I’m writing by how passionate I am about given sequences or characters. If I write it and I’m not passionate, and then I reread through it, and it just isn’t clicking for me, that’s when I know. That’s how I identify. It’s happened several times to me where books have needed major overhauls for those reasons.
[Howard] There was a fairly recent instance where I could tell that the plot needed to be moving faster. I needed to cut to action more quickly. So I scripted the cutting to action, and I had illustrated some things, and then I was stuck. I was stuck for like two weeks. I was blocked. Writer’s block for me… I said in the past that I don’t believe in it. I do believe in it, but not in the same sort of way. Writer’s block for me is my subconscious telling me you can’t write the part you want to write because that’s not what has to be written next. What has to be written next is you need to go back and fix this. In this case, what I did… I sat down with Sandra, and it was a… I have to confess, it was a shouting match filled with profanity, all on my part. I was shouting and screaming and ranting and she was listening very patiently. I was furiously fuming.
[Brandon] Your wife is so patient.
[Howard] I have all these strips laid out in front of me, and the problem is that I know that something has to be fixed, and I don’t know what it is. As we started reading it… we just started sliding the pieces of paper around, and finally I arrived at the fact that a Sunday strip… and I put a piece of paper down to represent that… needs to go right here, and it needs to do the following things. Sandra’s response was, “Okay, if a Sunday strip there does those things, then that will work. But a Sunday strip all by itself can’t do that.” That was the point at which I got to say, “Oh, I’m a professional cartoonist. I can make the Sunday strip do those things because that’s what’s required to fix the story.” But that session, that was exhilarating and miserable at the same time.

[Brandon] Now, listeners, you may be wondering why I spent the first half of this podcast talking about identifying the problem. That’s because… um… well, you can’t fix it until you know something’s wrong. New writers have a lot of trouble with this. I say this because I know I had a lot of trouble with this. I know that my writing group… people in it had a lot of trouble with this. Actually identifying what was wrong takes a lot of effort. Writing triage… it takes a lot of practice to learn. Often times, you’re going to identify the wrong thing. It’s going to be frustrating, because you’re going to have to try the wrong thing several times until it works. So if you’re a really new writer, this is not really a podcast for you. Your job is just to keep writing. You’re not going to be able to identify yet what’s wrong and what’s not wrong… oh, boy, I phrased that in a weird way. You’re just not going to be able to. Your job is to write, and get used to writing, get used to constructing characters and plots so that it all works out.
[Howard] I’ve shared this before. When I was studying audio engineering, we used to say that as an audio engineer sitting at the console, the producer who’s standing behind you and listening to the mix, the producer always knows when there’s a problem, and never knows how to fix it. As new writers, sometimes as alpha readers, we’re like that. We know when there’s a problem, but we don’t know how to fix it. The real challenge comes in when you’re the engineer sitting there turning knobs, trying to figure out how to make it sound right.
[Brandon] Writing practice is what teaches you how to be able to fix things. I even worry about really new writers having writing groups at all. And ruining their writing or telling them to fix things when they really shouldn’t be fixing things, they should just be writing and learning the craft.
[Howard] I think that… I don’t want to digress, but if you’re going to join a writing group as a brand-new writer, the writing group should exist to motivate you to write a lot.

[Brandon] Right. All right. Let’s do our book of the week. Howard, you previewed us by saying that you loved this book?
[Howard] I told you that I was going to tell you about a book that I really like. It’s The Warded Man by Peter Brett. It’s available on audible. I loved this book because it had stand-up-and-cheer moments in it that were not the epicly heroic a lone warrior against a million demons sorts of stand-up-and-cheer moments. They were the sorts of things that I as a reader… I as a person with a 21st-century lifestyle could relate to. They were triumphs of character, they were triumphs of courage in the face of small pettiness. I thought it was brilliantly done. The overarching setting, the fantasy setting and all that, is wonderful. But what really made that book work for me were the people who were in it. So go to audiblepodcast.com/excuse to start your 15 day free trial and check out The Warded Man by Peter Brett.
[Brandon] And then Dan can buy a new iPad. All right, Dan…
[Dan] A direct result.
[Brandon] That’s right. You click on that link, Dan gets an iPad.
[Dan] Woohoo!

[Brandon] All right, Dan. You found out that your story was broken. What did you do to fix it?
[Dan] Well, again, as I said, the main thing that I noticed… well, I knew it was broken, but then watching the writing group’s reaction showed me where it was broken. Which was principally, the ending is not being paid off properly and the mystery is not being set up properly. So I went back through… I did kind of what Howard said, where I rearranged a bunch of chapters and said, “Well, the information’s not coming out in the right order, let’s try this way and see if it works.” And wrestled with this for weeks. Finally, just one day realized, “Holy crap. I need an extra character in this.” This is what we mean by major overhaul. I needed to add an all-new character into several of the scene in order to make all of this stuff work. In order to set up the right kind of stuff, to give the characters someone… the right person to talk to in these instances, and had to go back and write several new chapters and change several of the other chapters so that this new character could be in there and make the story function.
[Howard] Let me ask a question here. When you rearranged stuff, when you were shuffling things around, what was the actual process? Were you just moving… changing the order of chapters in a Word document, or did you spread pieces of paper out as representative elements and push them around on a flat surface somewhere?
[Dan] For this particular book, I had created a paragraph… a chapter-by-chapter outline, each chapter being a paragraph. I took those, updated them slightly because my outline always changes by the time it turns into a book… so that I had these little chunks of chapter, and I moved those around. Actually, just in a Word document.
[Howard] In an electronic file? Okay.
[Dan] And looked at them and said, “Okay, well that means if this information is coming out here, then that will work much more effectively. What does that mean, what’s the fallout from that, what do I have to do in chapters two, three, and four now that I’ve changed the chapter one?” And figured out how that would shake down.

[Brandon] I’ve… one of the things I’ve learned as I’ve become more of a professional writer across my career is that during a given draft of a book, I can only focus on so many things. It’s frustrating to me. Part of me wants to be able to just learn to do it right the first time. But I just can’t.
[Howard] I give lessons.
[Brandon] I just can’t. I can’t do everything right the first time. On a first draft, there are certain things I’ll go into it knowing I need to fix. Often times, the things we’re talking about are the things I didn’t know I would need to fix when I started that first draft. The way I approach it when I need to do one of these things is I sit down and say, “Okay, this draft is really going to focus on X. It’s really going to focus on fixing this character. Major overhauls for me are usually character-based. This character is not working, either he isn’t interesting or he’s not… his internal conflict is not working. Something is wrong. So I will get a list of bullet points, I’ll brainstorm ideas of how to fix this character. Usually it means adding new subplots or it means ripping out subplots and adding new ones. Sometimes it means rewriting the character’s entire philosophy and scope and look at life. Then I will go scene-by-scene with that character and reread the scene, changing as I go, often twice in a row, and then the next one, twice in a row, and the next one, twice in a row. Just beginning to end, fixing that character.
[Howard] Wow. Earlier, before we started recording, you mentioned that you’ve got like 16 edits… 16 editorial drafts of… is it Towers of Midnight? Is that the name of the book?
[Brandon] Yeah. We probably don’t have time for 16. I’ll probably do three or four big drafts over the next couple of weeks. [Inaudible] So, yeah.
[Howard] So, 16 meaning three or four and a couple meaning six… I love authorial math, this is awesome.
[Brandon] I will have to go in with several big major things…
[Howard] But you’re going to make four passes… 3 to 4 passes in the next six weeks on…
[Brandon] A 350,000 word book.
[Howard] 350,000 words.
[Brandon] Best of luck to me, right?
[Howard] What’s amazing is that if I sit down to read a 350,000 word book, I’m lucky to read it in a week.
[Brandon] Yeah, it’s a lot of work. Fortunately for me, revision is something I can do large amounts of time in a given day. Writing new material, I can only do a little bit of in a given day. I can… well, not a little bit, but the well runs dry. Revision, I can force myself on.
[Howard] The other thing to keep in mind is that when you finished the first draft of Towers of Midnight, you did not finish it and say, “Oh, this manuscript is broken, and just needs to be overhauled.” You finish it knowing that the book’s ready for incremental processes.
[Brandon] Yep. Theoretically. Step-by-step, though. I always imagine things like this, it’s like sculpting… I said this before, making a sculpture. We’re knocking off pieces bit by bit.
[Dan] So give me a specific example, Brandon. I know for example that in Elantris at the editing stage, you had to knock out an entire character.
[Brandon] That was easy. Because it was a character… the reason the character needed to be knocked out is because at the three quarters mark, I introduced a new villain who distracted from the main process. So going through and just cutting that villain was actually not very hard at all, because it…
[Dan] Because part of the problem was it didn’t relate enough anyway? Okay.
[Brandon] Exactly. Much more difficult was fixing the second Mistborn book, which had major plotting issues. In that case, I had to find a way to step up the plot, to make it more action… give more action, more sense of danger and of threat. So in that case, I had to… if you’ve read the Mistborn books, I had to do… I actually added most of the concept of the siege later on in the drafting process. I hadn’t completely finished the book. But the entire… the siege of the city became the focus of the book. It’s the big climax of the book and all these things. That didn’t start as what the book was going to be about. The book started… the whole philosophy of the book is you’ve won, now what? How do you rule a kingdom? That’s much harder than knocking one down.
[Howard] That became the opening premise…
[Brandon] Right. But that was boring. It was actually boring. Ruling a kingdom is pretty boring.
[Howard] Well, but what you’ve just described there is… that’s in many ways the way the cinematic three act format works. Is that we have our opening premise, and then halfway through the first act, you realize, “Ah, that’s not really what this is about. It’s bigger.”

[Brandon] So. Dan, any last words for our person who started us on this? Something other than go listen to one of our other podcasts? Which I didn’t mean to say dismissively. One of our readers has, halfway through their book, realized that they’re very derivative. What would you counsel them to do?
[Dan] I would say go back, read through what you’ve read, read through your notes, figure out what it is that you really like about the elements you have inadvertently stolen from something else and what elements you don’t necessarily need. Then figure out how you can change them. What can you add to it, what can you go back through, is it a slightly different magic system, is it a different character, a different conflict? Something else that you can add into that and make it your own.
[Brandon] All right. I… oh. Howard?
[Howard] I was just going to say, if it’s a derivative setting, keep all your dialogue, keep all your characters, rip the setting out from under them, throw in a new setting, and see how much of your dialogue and characters you can keep. If your characters and your dialogue is derivative, you’re in a world of hurt, because that’s a lot of work.
[Brandon] If your main character… if it turns out you’ve accidentally made a dark elf resisting his culture and he fights with a pair of hand axes instead of a pair of scimitars, and that’s your only original thing…
[Dan] That’s your token stab at originality…
[Howard] Maybe you can swap him out for a plucky but lovable rogue…

[Brandon] Okay, before this goes any further, I’m going to end it and give you your writing prompt. Writing prompt this week is to take a story that you have written before and take one throwaway comment or throwaway concept somewhere in that story… find something that you didn’t mean to be important at all. I want you to instead read write that scene, rewrite that chapter, so that that idea becomes the major focus of it, and see what happens.
[Dan] Cool.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.