A friend of mine on Facebook admitted this morning that she was terrified of making changes in her unpublished epic (which is, as I understand it, under contract). I’d be terrified too, methinks, and I feel her pain. While The Fall isn’t anywhere near epic length, I’m contemplating turning the thing upside down again.

See, when I was writing it, I got stuck in the middle. I shoved, and I pushed, and it wasn’t working, so I skipped past the part that had me frustrated. After that, the rest of the book almost wrote itself. Then I made a substantial change to the beginning which necessitated rewriting the entire story — again, skipping the block in the middle. I was much happier with the story than I was with the original (admittedly sketchy) outline, but I still had that hole in the middle.

Last night, I was brainstorming about it with the hubby, and it finally hit me what was wrong: one of the intertwining plotlines climaxed in the middle of the story, and once that climax occurred, the story went sideways.

If I move it nearer the end of the book, it works a whole lot better. I still need to fill in the hole, but that should be easier once I get that tense, charged, emotional scene out of the middle where it doesn’t belong.

I do feel like I’ve been writing upside down, though. I keep shoving chapters around, but mostly shoving them into the end, almost like I really wrote the end of the book first. “Here’s the beginning! No, wait, that’s the end of the book too…”

The outline? HA! Fat lot of good that did me. I’d have been better off pantsing this one.