To quote the band Chicago, "everybody needs a little time away," and I guess that's true. After stepping back, taking the pressure off for a couple of weeks, and getting some fresh perspective, I'm back to editing the book with a renewed sense of purpose and direction.
I shouldn't be shocked that taking some time off from the book allowed me to come back and see it with a different set of eyes. It's what I did intentionally after I completed the initial draft at the end of last year.
When I returned to my draft files last week, I discovered why I'd been fighting so hard with my plot. I was trying to write a story that didn't match my writing style. My plot was telling a gritty noir story, but my prose was telling it like a sitcom. It's a pairing that was never going to work. I needed to re-calibrate and decide what story I was trying to tell and how I wanted to get there. It was a return to first principles: "Begin with the end in mind."
Am I trying to tell a gritty police story in the tradition of The Wire or True Detective, or am I trying to tell a story about my characters, who are not from that same hard-boiled world?
Sometimes it is easier to change the path you're walking on than it is to change the way you walk. So I decided to leave the heavy story behind and reshape it to fit with how my characters interact with the world. This means moving away from Hammett and closer to Christie by way of Jim Butcher, with a bigger dash of William Gibson to flavor the whole thing.
So that's what I'm doing. I'm simplifying the plot, making it less grim, and ensuring the clues dropped are fair so that you, the reader, have a chance at solving the mystery before Detective Bennett does.
Oh, and I've added an action set-piece. But I don't want to say anything more about that for fear of spoiling it.
I'll be back in a couple of weeks with another update.
"If the plan doesn't work, change the plan, but never the goal."