Finishing the Book

As you may or may not know, I recently finished my first full length novel - A Picture of the Past (PoP for short). I've finished short books before, but this one was actually full length. 99,000 words, in fact. I finished it - mmmm - probably a month or so ago, and haven't touched it since. It needs SO many edits, that I am kind of scared to pick it up again. So I'm working on a different book instead, while I glance at PoP out of the corner of my eye.

I just finished a couple articles in Writer's Digest about "Plotting vs. Pantsing" - you know, the writer who plots everything before they write vs the writer who just sits down and writes. I seem to fall somewhere in the middle. I seem to like sitting and just writing - and then doing a little mapping out if I get stuck, and going back AFTERWARDS to REALLY map things out. What really scared me about the articles, I think, was the comment in both articles that "Pansters" tend to start novels that really never go anywhere, and as much as I am not sure I liked the completed product of PoP, I love the idea enough that I desperately don't want it to be a dead end. But, even if I didn't completely like the completed product, if I still love the idea enough, that means there still has to be promise in it, right? So, here are a couple tips I pulled out of the article that have actually inspired me to go back and finally take another look at the book and see what I can make out of it:

The article suggested the following extremely useful points:

• If you are feeling stuck make a list of events in your story, leaving blanks as needed.
• Once you know how to get from your stopping point to the next fixed point, quit plotting and go back into pantsing.
• Don't try to list every single event and line of dialogue when making a list. 
• Imagine you're the protagonist and ask yourself what you would do next (I already do this a lot and it DOES help a lot).
• If you know where the plot needs to go, ask why your characters get to that point and keep repeating the question until you work backwards to where it all fell apart. 
• Retroactively plot the story. 
• Be open to reworking parts of your novel - if it isn't working, try "pantsing" the part to see if it goes in another direction.

One thing I appreciated and agreed with, was this sentence at the end of the second article:

"The trick is to get the story down, from beginning to end. Ultimately, the writers who get published are those who finish the first draft and then revise it. Get the words on the page and you're halfway there."