Revising one chapter at a time

Do you ever wonder if fragments of your notebooks will someday end up on display in some museum? | English: Manuscript fragment from Chapter 14 of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I admit it. Revising my rough manuscript is intimidating. For a few weeks now, I have been researching my general topic and thinking about starting my revisions. However, I have not actually done much writing. I have come up with a ton of new ideas, but I have not written many of them down. For the past few weeks, I have been more of a thinker than a doer.

Several times, I have opened my master file on my computer, or picked up the hard copy I printed out and thought about revising. But, where do you even begin? My first draft is full of plot holes and logistical errors. My recent research dictates that I completely change a few major elements of my story. Any way you look at it, it is a hot mess. There is so much work left to do, it is overwhelming.

It’s okay to write a crappy chapter once in a while

Saved by the mouse. No, not that kind of mouse. | English: A variety of computer mice built from 1986 to 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The other day, I wrote a terrible chapter. I had reached the “All hope is lost lull” in the final quarter of my current project. It was time to write a chapter in which my protagonist loses all hope of escaping her hopeless situation. She was trapped in a cellar, with no way out. I wrote a couple of pages of her chasing a mouse around the cellar and counting her food supply. But it was really boring. Nothing was happening.

I pushed through it. I had shown my protagonist losing hope, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that absolutely nothing had “happened” in the chapter. It was about as crappy as a chapter can get. But I didn’t know what else to do with it, so I let it stand and went about my business.