I mentioned yesterday how the editor I'm working with immediately saw the flaws in my novel.
The crucial issue was that I'd got confused with my target audience. I thought I'd written a YA novel, so had made my characters around 16 or 17. What I'd actually done was write a middle-grade book.
This created a weird tension in the story, as the characters weren't behaving and acting the way they should. They were acting more like 12-year-olds. This, I'm sure, resulted in more than one agent responding with, 'Sorry, I don't know what to do with this.'
Once I'd had this pointed out to me, I kicked myself rather hard.
I had two choices:
- Tweak the book, adding in more mature themes, a bit of romance and lust and perhaps a bit more adult language, and have the characters act the age they are. As the book was around 130,000 words, it wouldn't need much changing – it was an acceptable length for YA, so just change up the style a bit.
- Change the character ages to 11 or 12, the actual age of people that would most enjoy the book as it was. The problem there was that at 130,000 words, it was way too long for middle-grade, so it would need a good 30 to 40,000 words chopped out of it.
Option 1 seemed the most sensible, and a lot less daunting than option 2. I read a few YA books over the summer to get into the mindset, including Joe Abercrombie's (@lordgrimdark) quite brilliant The Devils, then set to work in September. It started off OK, but as I went along, a gnawing sense that something was definitely amiss grew inside me. By the time I got to chapter 8, I had to stop. I felt like I was destroying my book.
The world and the magic, which take a bit of setting up, were getting drowned out by hormones. It was horrible. I was starting to hate my book, which we all do at some point, usually in the early stages, but this was an act of sabotage.
I thought more about it and realised that I'd never really wanted to write a YA book at all. I wanted to write a Star Wars/Harry Potter style coming of age book for 10-year-old me. The problem was that I'd listened to the stupid advice on the Internet that said no-one wanted to buy that, and no agent would touch it. So I'd tried to write something else.
As it happened, I ended up writing the book I wanted to write anyway, but confused the issue by making the characters older because that 'fixed it'.
Important lesson learned. Just write what you want to write. Write what makes you happy. The minute you listen to nonsense on YouTube about what will and won't sell, you're opening up a world of pain. There's always a market for your book.
So it had to be option 2. Cull a lot of words and address the other issues the editor had identified in the process.
Tune in next week to see if I could do it without destroying the story.