Kill Your Darlings

The first works are always the worst

Sunk cost fallacy. Some of you may have heard of it; for others, this is the first time. It's the feeling that you need to stick with something because of the amount of time or money that you have put into it. Such is the case with my novel, The Heist. It's a work that I was told was much better than my first but had gaping holes in the plot and a lot of work that would need to be completed to polish the story out. So after over ten months working on it and over 120k words written, I am setting it aside and moving on. 

Writing The Heist was a great journey for me. I learned through it what it felt like to create a side character, Erica, that was much more interesting than the main character, Julian. So I pulled Erica into a main character position like she deserved, but doing so turned it into a book with two main characters who both viewed the world from a first-person perspective. A truly difficult feat to accomplish effectively and was out of my current skill set. 

Another major learning curve was plotting. For my first novel, August Fairview, I did absolutely zero plotting. I took an idea and ran with it, letting emotions and ideas pop into existence wherever I wanted. I then didn't address the plot holes before publishing because, to be frank, I was quite done with August and wanted to move on to my next book. Which is why August Fairview won't remain on the shelves forever. For this novel, The Heist, there was an outline. A humble attempt at a plot, and that outline changed even when I was writing the book, so I can't say I held true to it. So once the book was done, I looked back and saw many holes that would take quite a lot of patching to fix. This weekend, I started writing my third novel, which will be the first in a trilogy, and I have spent two months plotting the story. So I know everything that will happen; the world has been built, and lives have been fixed. But I will let the characters’ personalities remain unknown so that they can build authentically as I write. 

My best discovery from writing is that of learning more about myself. Writing over a hundred thousand words in ten months has taught me that I love reworking stories numerous times, and that rework is much easier in a true multi-tiered plot rather than paragraphs. So I bid that work adieu and wish for you to hang tight because my next novel should be much quicker coming to you.