Book Gnomes Please Help

I think gnomes are little creatures that come in the middle of the night to do things for you right? If so, I need their help.

Currently I am having a mini internal panic attack. When I was a kid I was never any good with math word problems. I still am not good at them. I take a look at the words and I start to think of variables that could change the outcome of the answer. I know the point of these problems is to take the information and be able to put it into a mathematical formula, but I could never get past the story told by these problems. Heck, I wanted to know if the cyclist would finish the race, if that well was ever going to be dug, and is Chris ever going to save enough money and why was he saving it.

Now I am having word problems again. Except this time instead of trying to find the right words I am totally stalling on putting that formulaic problem behind those words. Maybe this makes no sense. But when I wrote the first draft of this novel I just wrote. I didn’t think about character development, emotional responses, imagery, themes or any of that. Every once in awhile it crept in, but it was mostly by accident. I started at Point A and I knew I was going to arrive at Point B approximately 50,000 words later.

I have read through almost half of my rough draft thus far and I feel like I made a seven layer bean dip and forgot layers two, four, and six and now I have to somehow shove them in and make this bean dip still turn out like the picture in the recipe book. Right now I am trying to determine the most efficient way to tackle this problem and my mind is giving me several solutions. None of them are easy. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But every solution also comes with its own problems.

Bottom line is that I am no good at the technical stuff. When someone tells me to define a character’s want and their goal my mind thinks, “Well, they want their goal, isn’t that one in the same thing?” If I am told to give a synopsis, summary, headlines, sequence of events, of each chapter, I also see that as one thing. Themes and imagery are oftentimes so intertwined I have a problem pulling those apart also. Tell me to give you a one sentence summary of my novel and I have a mental aneurysm.

And this is why I have flailed and failed every time I have attempted to edit one of my manuscripts. I am getting dizzy with this ever changing focus on the background and then on the foreground that I can never get to the heart of any of it.

Rough day. Moving on.