Realizing your new novel is rubbish

I find the early stages of writing a new novel to be the most exciting. At the beginning, anything is possible. You get to really exercise your god complex as you create characters, events, even whole worlds. But it’s all downhill from there as you slog through daily word counts, week after week, dragging your imagination through the muck of Consistency, Realism, and Internal Logic. To compound the misery, you occasionally realize you have made a critical error and have to go back to rework something you thought was finished.

But it isn’t that bad if you can figure out your mistakes before you actually make them. For example, I recently realized that the novel I had just finished planning and was about to start writing in earnest was wrong. Very wrong, in fact, in many wrong-ish ways.

First, I designed it as a science fiction story, only it wasn’t. Just the other evening, I realized that my story was actually a space opera, science fantasy, whatever you prefer to call it when the “science” is an excuse for escapism rather than a vehicle for exploring Big Ideas.

Having realized that I was about to write a fantasy story, I decided to do it properly. I got rid of the spaceships and robots and aliens and spacey things. This meant losing all the technical explanations for why the plot worked, and it also meant losing many of the important elements of my characters’ back stories. Which was annoying.

But I carried on. I recast the story as a sort of alternate history, or historical fantasy, which meant research, and lots of it: European history, African history, Central American history, maps, explorers, religions, wars – the lot. I had to rename most of the characters, and replace several of them with completely new people, none of which were even slightly robotic.

And seeing as how I removed all the sciencey bits and replaced them with fantastical religious elements, I had to rewrite everyone’s back stories, especially since the Martian Crusades would no longer figure prominently in my tale.

The result: A completely different book with much deeper themes, with more accessible characters and concepts, which will probably appeal to an entirely different audience. And that is a very good thing indeed, because the new audience is larger and more likely to want to read the book.

It seems unlikely that, of all things, an author would discover that he or she is writing in the wrong genre. Normally, you might realize that you have placed a character in two places at the same time, or something equally logistical, which can be fixed with minimal effort.

But I am pleased at having to suffer through this exercise because the new version of MERIDIAN will be much, much better than the old one. Now, it’s not only a book I want to write, but it’s actually one I would like to read as well.