That Sinking Feeling.

Let’s just start from the beginning:

While outlining my Christmas story (which will obviously have to be for Christmas 2014 now, but that’s another matter), I decided that it would have four parts. Part one would include everything I had written previously, and parts two through four would progress it exactly the way I had originally planned. I figured that it would be somewhere in the 20,000-word range, making it my first official novella.

Then it happened.

I had a sinking feeling. A feeling that I was overwriting and over-explaining—something I tend to do in first drafts. A feeling that maybe things could be a little bit simpler than they were—that the story might be better if it was a little more concise.

The feeling that the 25 pages I had just finished writing might better serve the story as a paragraph, possibly two.

Sigh.

It’s been a few days since I had that epiphany, and I still haven’t decided exactly what I want to do yet. I don’t want to cut the entire thing out since there is quite a bit of character development in there and I’m not sure I can put it elsewhere in the story without it just feeling shoehorned in. However, after reading through the entire first part, it’s repetitive and predictable.

Would it be entirely unwriterly of me to flip a coin and go from there? #firstdraftproblems