It's hard to admit, but I've been having fun revising my old novel. It seems like a year is enough time for me to have lost emotional attachment to the exact form of the old novel. I've spent the weekend cheerfully cutting out chunks and rewriting others, and totally reordering the structure. I'm about 45 pages in on the new version (I'm guessing it'll be around 500 in the end, maybe a little longer). But now I'm taking a pause to think things through, which is far less fun.

I've decided to try to make use of a method called Turbo-tightening by Alicia Rasley. A friend has just used it successfully for revising her novel, and I figured it was worth a go. Only problem is, now I'm trying to apply it, and it's tough.

I'm working on the "macro" right now, trying to write the externals at the beginning, middle and end of my novel for my main character. What it has shown me immediately is that my main character is passive. I guess I knew this, but it hadn't imposed itself so firmly on my consciousness. At least at the beginning, other characters' manipulations move him around. Now, a protagonist needs only take control of a situation towards the end of a novel, but even at the beginning, they need to react to events in a way that digs them in deeper. Mine is reacting emotionally, on an "internal" level, but he's not doing it on an external level. He is not protag-ing. If I can make him do that, so that what happens is a result of his reactions to situations, then I may have a more driving book.

The new structure I've imposed on the first few chapters has made the story drive forward more powerfully than it did before, but it hasn't eliminated the above problem, only hidden it from the most obvious view.

When I finally get through the revision techniques, I'm going to take a much closer look at Alicia Rasley's website. It's got a whole lot of stuff on it, and if it's only a fraction as useful as this, I want to read it.