Resurrect that Novel

All writers have them ~ a dead novel stuffed at the bottom of a file cabinet, that 90,000 word docx stuck in an obsolete computer, the final draft shoved to the end of your to-do list. As doves coo outside my window and flowers burst forth in my garden with new life and renewed vigor now is as good a time as any to resurrect that novel, the story you’ve never stopped thinking about, the goal you continue to believe in.

Take on the task of reviving your old dream with the spirit of balance that comes at Spring Equinox as day and night are equal. That you left the novel, memoir, screenplay in the dark signifies a crisis of sorts. Your critique group’s lack of encouragement dragged you down. The couple of positive notes after a few rounds of submissions did little to stop the bleeding from the onslaught of form rejection letters. Your agent hated the final product.

Your novel never died. And your belief in your story has likely never died either. What died was your belief in yourself. You reached an impasse and suffered a dark night. In rummaging through your choices, you decided that giving up was the message, the lesson, the logical outcome and quitting far easier than climbing back into the fire.

With the paradigm of life, death and rebirth of the Universal Story in mind, accept that your story as spent long enough in limbo, never truly dead nor truly alive (as signified on the Plot Planner as the downward line — loss of energy — directly following the Dark Night / Crisis and before marching steadily upward to the Climax). 

Get ready to revive your passion, reinvigorate your enthusiasm and stimulate your inner strength. Dust off that old manuscript and join me in taking another look from a fresh, new angle and with the help of an old friend.

Rather than take you through the steps of a final plot test, I’m going to assume your plot and structure are in place with the help of The Plot Whisperer book and workbook or having watched all the videos in Revise Your Novel in a Month (if you’re drafting and the plot is not entirely firmed up, adapt the exercises to your specific needs).

This time, the tests come:

1) at the word level within each scene, testing for the 7 essential elements of plot in each scene using my newest book Writing Blockbuster Plots

2) at the scene level by identifying each scene type with the help of Writing Deep Scenes

First, take a few days to retrieve your manuscript. Straighten up your writing cave. Then, meet me back here in a couple of day and resurrect that novel you thought was dead to live again.