Saving Mr. Crooked Nose

Last July, I worked on and finished a novel. The problem is on August 1st, I realized that when it was done, it was whale puke. How do I save this story and make it salvageable?

How this situation came about was that I decided to focus harder on my writing. I’ve found that doing NaNoWriMo is the most effective way to ensure that I actually get a novel done. So since I was starting in June, I enrolled into the Camp NaNoWriMo program so I do it into the summer instead of November.

So this was the “merchant ships in SPACE!” story that I named my fan club after. I thought this would be really fun – I did a lot of research into what merchant marines do today – and I managed to write 57k words of the novel and finished it on time! However, I realized within a couple thousand words of the end that… it sucked.

However, I don’t want this story to go to waste. The story of Cameron Crooked Nose (yes, that’s the main character – the naming conventions of this world is a little tricky) I know that part of the problem is that I tried doing the “flashback.” Problem: I really didn’t know where I was going with the story, so I didn’t really know where he’d been. Which is the primary problem – there was no plot!

You think I would have figured that one out, but I was so enamored with the setting that I just ran with it… and didn’t think about what story would actually be told. Whoops. Well, now I have a chance to fix all that.

Now that I’ve had enough time to think about it, I feel more confident that I can tackle this problem without beating myself up too much. Have you run into this before? Love a concept so much that you completely miss the flaws? Let me know in the comments below!