Reassembled: Dr. Frankenstein Just Called
It was the middle of 2019. I had a major event in September, and I’d been really hoping to finish my book and get it out in print by then. I’m not a fast writer, and it was difficult, but I was making headway. Then I decided to take a preliminary word count, just to get an idea of how long my book would be. I figured I was getting fairly long, and maybe it would run 120,000 words.
My estimate was over 180,000 words.
Just to translate, given a standard book page, that would run over 700 pages. I’m a small press/indie author, and this is a self-publishing project. My odds of anyone buying a 700+ page book is – well, slim, unlike the spine of my unwritten book. It was clear that I had to do something.
No problem, right? I’d just cut it in half.
Except… cutting it in half meant that all the careful structure I’d set up would lead nowhere in the first book, and come from nowhere in the second. And the odds of having someone buy my second book after a complete lack of resolution in my first would also be fairly slim.
This necessitated a great deal of thought on how to fix the problem. I could cut out a lot of detail – but that detail was important to both the characterization and the plot. Paring it down to the bare bones wasn’t a solution. I was running short on ideas. I needed to revisit the idea of cutting it in half. But if I did that, I had to take a page from the late Victor Frankenstein and reassemble my book.
There was no help for it. Only a big-name author could get away with presenting half a book. I needed to make each half of this book a complete work with a plot that had a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if there were threads hanging in the first to pick up on in the second book.
I had one main plot, but I had a major subplot; major enough to make into a main plot if I tweaked it a bit. Only, in order to do that, I had to sacrifice my beautiful structure. Maybe I’ll use that idea in another book.
Restructuring was something I’d never done before on this scale; I usually have a pretty good idea of the story I’m telling when I write it. I’m usually a “find out what’s going on as you write” writer or a “this is the plot, but the details will reveal themselves later” writer. For this, I went into each chapter and wrote down the key events in each. Keeping the first outline pristine so I could refer to it, I made a second outline where I started to move elements around. I also began to add to the plot of the first book, enlarging one character’s role greatly, and introducing them earlier in the book. I took chunks and moved them forward or back, including shuffling some of them to a nebulous spot in the second book. By the time I was finished, I was looking at a Frankenbook; a book taken apart and re-stitched into the framework of something rather different.
Keeping the original draft so I wouldn’t lose anything, I set out to make a new draft of the book. This got unexpectedly complicated, because I decided to cut the size of my chapters in half in the new version. Since I write each chapter as a separate file before combining them in the end version, that meant renaming my files with the correct numbers. It seemed straightforward until I started to do it, and found myself confusing chapter numbers, especially while moving pieces of the book around in order to facilitate the new structure, and getting confused in places where I needed to write entirely new material. I sewed the liver to the kidneys, and accidently saved the spleen over the pancreas. I actually ending up with three new drafts, mostly because I had so much trouble getting my chapters straight that I felt like I was juggling the monster’s internal organs rather than putting them where they went. And I still ended up with half a chapter orphaned – I fixed that, but I ended up with a chapter 16.5 that duplicated half of chapter 16, and confused me when I wasn’t sure if I should delete it or not.
Halfway through, I realized I had another problem: the subplot, as originally written, ended on an anti-climactic note. It worked as a subplot, but as a main plot, it didn’t. So I had another fit of panic, while I tried to figure out how to punch it up. With the help of my best friend (who brainstormed with me repeatedly when all this happened, and to whom I owe the fact that I was even willing to tackle this) I came up with an idea, and I think it makes the whole thing stronger. It certainly makes it more active.
Piece by piece, I straightened out the limbs. Piece by piece, the bones and flesh came together to form a recognizable shape: a new book. It may have looked like a patchwork quilt, it may have acquired a bolt or two somewhere along the line, but it was a complete product. I added the new material, worked on the climax. Just before Christmas, I finished it.
Keep in mind, I’m not done. Now I’m in the middle of where I need to do the skin grafts to hide the seams, do some facial sculpting to make it look like a real person, make sure all the blood vessels and muscles and sinews are working properly. It needs to be able to breathe and eat and move and think and reason. That is still proving a difficult. I’m forging my way through an entirely new writing experience, one that I would just as soon have avoided. But I am learning that I can stretch myself as an author, and that just because I run up against an obstacle, it doesn’t mean I have to discard my work.
The next test is whether my creation can perform well when I put it out there in the world. Hopefully I will be more successful on that score than Dr. Frankenstein.