So when it comes to my book writing project, it can be finally said that - after months of rewriting - it looks like that I've managed to get it more or less completed. It looks like that I'm in a situation where I can't do that much to make it better anymore.
Indeed, over the last few days I've noticed that the story finally seems to work pretty well from start to finish. The book is long enough, the pacing is solid and the story doesn't seem to have moments where you think that it's not believable enough.
Not surprisingly, getting the story to work and readable enough hasn't been that easy or effortless. There have been moments when I have really needed patience and resilience because otherwise things wouldn't have worked out at all.
So when it comes to those annoying surprises that I had during the rewriting process, one of them was how difficult it was to fix certain specific problems in the story. No matter what I did, the fixes didn't seem to work (they initially looked good, but not later).
So when it comes to those annoying surprises that I had during the rewriting process, one of them was how difficult it was to fix certain specific problems in the story. No matter what I did, the fixes didn't seem to work (they initially looked good, but not later).
The problem in these cases was that I had a tendency to micromanage things too much. I more or less thought that as long as I would change some of the specific words, the whole thing would miraculously start to work again (it never did).
In reality, in case you face a situation that doesn't seem to work, it's usually a better strategy to find a solution where (for example) your character simply tries to do something else. That way it's much more likely that the scene will feel more natural and plausible.
Another thing that surprised me during the rewriting process was how much I actually needed to rewrite the book. It's not enough to give your chapters a couple of rewrites and think that it's enough - especially when it comes to those later chapters.
In my case, I found it to be especially frustrating that even though I had fixed the earlier chapters in the book, I had not polished the latter ones enough. I just thought they would be solid because the earlier ones worked too (complete lack of logic there).
Thankfully, when it came to these later chapters, you pretty much 'just' needed to have the patience to revisit and re-re-rewrite them again. You needed to have the patience to keep going and rewrite so that the story could actually become good enough.
Still, when it comes to this whole rewriting process, there was clearly one thing that surprised me the most. By far the biggest surprise (a positive one) was how much the rewriting process actually can have an effect on the length of the book.
After all, when I first wrote here about me starting to rewrite the book, I wrote that perhaps at best I could increase the page count by something like 25%. That was pretty much the best case scenario and I thought I was already reaching a bit with that estimation.
Yet, once I was finally done with rewriting the last chapter in the book, it turned out that I had increased the length of the book by almost 60%. That was a big surprise and made all the difference in making the story as well paced and enjoyable as possible.
In that sense, now that I've finished the script and have started sending it to different publishers, I'm pretty sure that I've done my best here with the project. I'm pretty certain that I've tried my best to make sure that the story could be as good as it can only be.
After all, not only did I manage - in all likelihood - to fix those specific problems in the book, I also managed to re-re-re-write the latter chapters. These efforts helped to make the story 'long enough' and also gave the book as a whole a good flow.
In the end, whether the book is eventually at some point going to get published, is another issue. There are certainly no guarantees and I shouldn't be thinking that it's a shoe-in to get it published by one of the major companies out there.
After all, no matter how good the book is and how much value it might have, it's still a bit of a crapshoot to break it in the industry. It's not guaranteed that I'll be published with this story (it was difficult for J.K.Rowling too) no matter how much I'd want it to happen.
At the same time, considering how hard I've worked with the project, I think I would deserve to get lucky here. I think I deserve to get lucky here, because even though the book could always be a tiny bit better, in my opinion it's still good enough to be published.
In my case, I found it to be especially frustrating that even though I had fixed the earlier chapters in the book, I had not polished the latter ones enough. I just thought they would be solid because the earlier ones worked too (complete lack of logic there).
Thankfully, when it came to these later chapters, you pretty much 'just' needed to have the patience to revisit and re-re-rewrite them again. You needed to have the patience to keep going and rewrite so that the story could actually become good enough.
Still, when it comes to this whole rewriting process, there was clearly one thing that surprised me the most. By far the biggest surprise (a positive one) was how much the rewriting process actually can have an effect on the length of the book.
After all, when I first wrote here about me starting to rewrite the book, I wrote that perhaps at best I could increase the page count by something like 25%. That was pretty much the best case scenario and I thought I was already reaching a bit with that estimation.
Yet, once I was finally done with rewriting the last chapter in the book, it turned out that I had increased the length of the book by almost 60%. That was a big surprise and made all the difference in making the story as well paced and enjoyable as possible.
In that sense, now that I've finished the script and have started sending it to different publishers, I'm pretty sure that I've done my best here with the project. I'm pretty certain that I've tried my best to make sure that the story could be as good as it can only be.
After all, not only did I manage - in all likelihood - to fix those specific problems in the book, I also managed to re-re-re-write the latter chapters. These efforts helped to make the story 'long enough' and also gave the book as a whole a good flow.
In the end, whether the book is eventually at some point going to get published, is another issue. There are certainly no guarantees and I shouldn't be thinking that it's a shoe-in to get it published by one of the major companies out there.
After all, no matter how good the book is and how much value it might have, it's still a bit of a crapshoot to break it in the industry. It's not guaranteed that I'll be published with this story (it was difficult for J.K.Rowling too) no matter how much I'd want it to happen.
At the same time, considering how hard I've worked with the project, I think I would deserve to get lucky here. I think I deserve to get lucky here, because even though the book could always be a tiny bit better, in my opinion it's still good enough to be published.
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