The bare bones

Now that I had a clear view of the mess in front of me (sort of) I was desperate to untangle. Luckily we'd purchased a massive whiteboard to plan our wedding on, which was brilliant for the next stage. I propped the board up, and used my chapter mapping to put every major event on a post it note in the order it occurred in the novel (even if I knew it would be scrapped.)

At first it looked like this:

It prompted me to think about the timeline of my novel. The inciting incident is that a girl has been missing for 6 months. This didn't seem current enough, so I reduced it to 3 months. Even then, I thought, there's no new evidence, the most exciting part of this book is in the past, and they just talk about it until the last quarter when there's a discovery. So I took that discovery, and I opened the book with it.

It was very easy to pick a post it note up and stick it somewhere else.

But what this meant in reality, was a massive re-structure and even more aspects which now wouldn't work.

For some reason this made me laugh, loudly, for a substantial amount of time.

Then I got back to work.

I reconsidered every event; the order of it, the logic, the transition into the next. I screwed up the ones I hated. I added bridges. I scribbled out and re-wrote. From the Public Edit I attended a few weeks back, there was one piece of advice which really stuck, 'Put the events in your novel in their most dramatic order.' And I used this to guide my re-plotting.

I knew that I needed to decide on the duration, and a month fitted. I chopped the story up into one of four weeks. by splitting up the board:

I added a few thoughts as they occurred and made some big changes, such as:

- I swapped two character's personalities and subplots. I thought it would be more interesting and refreshing if the Dad was teary and struggling, and the Mum was cold and cutting.

-Introduced new characters so that my current ones had friends and jobs, instead of just this intense world with five people.

-I drafted in where the reader would get the big reveals. The book is based on secrets, and I needed to drip feed them through - making sure they were rearing their heads at the right time.

The length was an issue; I had a beginning and end, with the middle spanning 50,000 words. I needed to stretch this to at least 80,000 without the extra 30,000 coming across as desperate polyfiller.

When I looked up from this I'd lost four hours, but gained the skeleton of my book - a fair exchange.