When the Foundation Cracks

Now we're getting to the hard part.

Putting tens of thousands of words together in a few weeks is a neat parlor trick. But it's a far cry from a finished novel. That’s not to say that the first act of putting your ideas on the page isn’t hard. Lots of would-be writers never even get this far. But the next part of the process is the one that really tests your desire to finish the project. It’s the part where you have to make the story actually work.

This week's essay is a recounting of where I'm at in the editing process.

Here’s what nobody tells you about first drafts: you’re basically building a house while simultaneously drawing the blueprints. You’re figuring out load-bearing walls as you construct them. By the time you finish your first draft, you realize that you’ve built the kitchen where the bathroom should be, and that the whole second floor needs to shift three feet to the left.

That’s where I’m right now.

Structural editing isn’t about sentence rhythm or word choice. It’s about the architecture of your story:

For me, it meant asking hard questions: How does my protagonist actually access crucial evidence? What makes the technical aspects believable? Why would certain characters make the choices they do? How does the timeline push the investigation forward?

Some of these questions had good answers already. Some required significant rewrites. Some sent me down research rabbit holes about forensic procedures and technical details I’d glossed over in the first draft.

When I returned to my manuscript after the break, I could finally see the structural issues I’d been too close to notice while drafting. Plot holes I’d papered over with "I'll fix it later" sticky notes. Character motivations that made sense in my head but never quite made it onto the page. Evidence chains that depended on convenient coincidences rather than actual logic.

The biggest structural issue was this: I killed a character that I shouldn’t have. It undermined the entire investigation. Without this character alive, the case against the killer was weak at best. I could see why the villain wanted her dead. I had to bring her back to life. The plot was broken without her.

Making that single change was like dropping a rock in a quiet pond. It rippled through everything and forced me to rethink how evidence was discovered, who knew what and when, and how my protagonist actually solves the case.

I won’t lie. Realizing my draft had fundamental structural problems was a hit to the ego. I’d spent three months planning and drafting this story, and now I am tearing chunks of it apart. It felt like a setback.

But first drafts are supposed to be messy. They’re supposed to have problems. That’s their job. They exist so we can figure out what the story actually is, fill in the parts that are missing, and take out the parts that don’t fit. This is the heart of the phrase, “kill your darlings.”

The structural edit is where we take all that raw material from the first draft and shape it into something that works.

Here’s what that looks like in action. These are the edits I am working on right now:

It’s slower than drafting. It requires more brain power. But it’s deeply satisfying when a fix clicks into place and a whole section of the story suddenly works.

The good news is that once the structure is solid, everything else gets easier. This really is the peak of the mountain. Once I get to the top, once I know the plot works, I can move on to individual chapters and make sure they each work. It is a much smaller task when you are considering 3500 words at a time and not 100,000.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a killer's confession scene to write.

Onward.