Let me explain why I like having people read along. The other day I got a comments from two of my readers which both pointed to the same problem. On the surface the two comments appeared to be talking about different things, but reading them made me realize that I had a structural flaw. Not a huge one, but one it made sense to fix now instead of waiting until I was finished with the novel.
I have the whole thing outlined so I know where I’m going with it. In this case, I’d planned on presenting information that the reader needed a couple of chapters later. By moving it forward, I addressed the two seemingly unrelated comments and also fixed another structural gap that no one had flagged yet.
Now, I am careful about what I stop and fix. I’m also specific with my readers that I don’t want sentence-level word-smithing at this stage. The thing I’m interested in is if the story is working. So the things I’ll fix are structure issues like timing, motivation, info-dumping or conflict.
I only go back to fix it at this stage if I read the comment and think, “My God! This is completely right! Blind! I was blind!” Usually when that happens, I also have a general idea about how to fix it. Please note that having the idea and being able to execute said idea are not the same thing.
In this case, however, it involved moving half a scene from Chapter 8 to Chapter 6 and fleshing it out. This made Chapter 6 an ungodly 6500 words, which is Too Long for my tastes, so I split two of the scenes out of that and declared them Chapter 7. That’s bumped all the following chapters up a number but, overall, the structure feels much better.
And now, for those of you reading along, I’ve posted the new Chapter 8 draft which used to be Chapter 7.
If you want to read along, swing by to read the ground rules.
