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Tuesday January 28th. My first foray into revising the novel.

Yesterday I created a large spreadsheet using Excel so that I could figure out how many scenes were told from the point of view of Kelsey Webb.

Today I used it. I skimmed the novel, numbered the scenes, and listed on the Excel spreadsheet the point of view of each scene. 92 scenes. Somewhere under a dozen points of view. Of the 92 scenes, KeIsey narrated 43 of them--45% of them. 

 As I skimmed over the novel, I found that all the important scenes were in Kelsey's point of view. Most of the other points of view could be easily eliminated, replaced with dialogue. The spreadsheet made it clear to me: this novel needed to be 100% told by the 18-year-old farm girl, Kelsey Webb.

The rest of today was all about reimagining act one of the novel. Act one was fourteen scenes long. But some of those scenes were only a page or a page and a half in length. When I started the novel, I was writing short scenes, thinking about some of the better thriller novels I had read. as I skim through the text. I notice that the key scenes were really pretty long, certainly not two or three pages, but we're talking about 20 or 30. That will be an issue I'll have to deal with later. I read and reread act one of the book. It became, it became clear to me as. to what I needed to do. I consolidated scenes, bringing the number of scenes down to 9.

I cut two scenes. One was the opening scene, which is where the English teacher, who is the advisor of Kelsey Webb, is murdered in the Pennsylvania game lands. My wife and I agreed that that scene needed to be in there to start the book And certainly a number of books open with a murder scene. Rereading the book, however, I decided that we would not start that way. and that might be a mistake. I need to think about it more.

Having made those changes, the action seemed more focused and moved more naturally. For instance, at the end of a morning meeting, Kelsey took her mentee, whose name is Tyne, home for lunch. Andy did things that 18 year old girls would do. listening to music and thumb. ing through magazines. that scene also depicted Kelsey's dad. and characterized them as a 50 year old Gruff, no nonsense and opinionated man. All that was nice and. the. Lines about the girls was kind of cute, however. it was really unnecessary for the plot. Instead, I had Tyne stay at school and have lunch with the superintendent of the school district. which certainly added to the suspense as opposed to diluting it.

Designating Kelsey as the narrator of the whole story is was the right decision. Reducing the number of pages in act one also is the right way to go. It's true that I have a lot of rewriting ahead of me, but I'm looking forward to it. The story now seems much more immediate to me. I start the rewriting of act one tomorrow..

Back to the spreadsheet: having read "Eight Steps to a Perfect Scene," by C. S. Laken, (https://www.livewritethrive.com/2017/06/29/8-steps-to-a-perfect-scene/), I put in the following checklist / fill-out cells: Purpose of scene, in media's res, set scene in opening (exposition), opening hook conflict, inner conflict, external conflict, rising action, dilemma or crucible, climax, closing hook or cliffhanger, and how does the POV character of the scene change? Laken says these are essential attributes of any scene, and I think they are particularly important in a thriller. So when I'm rewriting these scenes, I'll be very careful to make sure that each has those attributes. Tune in tomorrow night, and I'll tell you how the first day of rewriting went.