He wanted me to raise the stakes for my character. So, me being who I am, immediately came up with this brilliant and complicated plot device for raising the stakes. It meant changing a bunch of stuff, introducing family secrets, creating unexpected twists and turns, and I can see now, asking a lot from the reader in the suspension of disbelief area. When I ran it by my wonderful agent, he said something to the effect that it could work without being too encouraging. In his infinite wisdom and experience of working with temperamental writers (I am not!), he asked a simple question that should have deflated the idea entirely . At the time, I said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. I can make it work.” I now imagine him at his desk, smiling and nodding, and thinking, “She’ll figure it out once she sees how much work she’s making for herself.”So this week I started on the revisions. The more I got into them, the more complicated it all became. I’ve been walking around saying, “Oh, the revisions are going great!” but secretly they’ve been nagging at me because I felt like I might be on the wrong path. At one point, the new stuff was getting so convoluted I stuck a post-it note on my desk that says “Keep it simple” and yet, that didn’t really help. So…this morning, I was writing in my journal, which I do for thirty minutes every morning – it’s to me what morning coffee is to my husband, I can’t function without it – and suddenly it struck me that I was going about this all wrong and that there really was a very, very simple way to raise the stakes that made a hundred times more sense than what I was doing. Needless to say, I am elated! And I expect my agent will be relieved.
A good agent is like a good parent. They try to point you in the right direction, but sometimes you have to run into the walls all by yourself before the sense gets knocked into you. So anyway…thanks, Michael!
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