After sweating bullets of self-doubt while doing some major scene shuffling in The Real Story manuscript, I’m getting excited. This feels right. The biggest challenge was when I took it out of chronological order, so that the story no longer opens with the narrator Angelica as a seventeen-year old and subsequently follows her life for the next twenty years. Now, it begins with a dramatic scene from a more contemporary part of the book, years after she has learned the horrible family secret that changed her life, and realizes she’s taken the “wrong” path and married the “wrong” man. Then, through flashbacks, she remembers the turbulent year when she met her no-good husband, and then further back to when she was a teen, and first began to suspect that there was something unsettling about her family (read query letter) Interestingly, the initial draft of the manuscript was not chronological, but as it was still in its early stages (the latter part of the story was envisioned, but yet unwritten), the starting point was probably not the best, so I took the advice of a mentor, and changed the narration into chronological order. The biggest problem with an orderly order for this story, however, was that the opening led readers (and confused publishers, according to my agent) to believe it was a YA novel, when clearly, it is not. The middle section also dragged in parts. So, I needed to shake things up. The hardest part was finding the best opening. There were four scenes that I thought might work. To see how the story would progress, however, I had to basically reshape the rest of the novel…. times four… to see how each beginning would work. This led to weeks of trial and error. I began to question what I was doing. I was unhappy, preoccupied, snappish, and difficult for my family, and myself, to get along with. But once I settled on one particular opening, everything else fell into place. (Generally speaking. It didn’t fall quickly, by any means.) I’m working on the transitions now, so that the flashbacks fit seamlessly into the story. In order to get the character’s first love/sexual relationship, and the discovery of the big family lie, the trick is to make these scenes from the past so meaty that the reader won’t mind straying from of the present day narrative for awhile. This is also the stage when a lot of paring takes place. The manuscript has gone from a bloated 113,000 words to a cleaner 101,000 words, even though I cut several scenes only to reinsert some of them. All of this reminds me that writing is a process. There are times when you fear you’re in over your head, and you don’t know what you’re writing about. This is when you have to trust that you’ll somehow figure it out. As author A. L. Kennedy says “if you haven’t pulled an all-nighter and written until you can’t remember who you are and produced work you couldn’t possibly have produced and been ambushed by insights and dragged up mountains and over cliffs by ideas that don’t even feel like your own, then you’ve missed a treat. Just my opinion” This is what my writing life has been like for the last few weeks. I think the treat is when you see it coming together.