So, we have swathes of information in hand, now. Treatments, loglines, plot and character arc flaws, and tension and pacing problems. All (hopefully) nicely organised so you can pull together all the aspects and problems of a particular chapter, arc, act, character or storyline with ease.  The whole time, I've been reiterating "don't fix it yet", "don't touch", and "just note what's wrong". Hopefully it's become clear why you don't dive in a fix the first problem you see - a lot of those problems are iceburg tips, or perhaps smoke signals from a problem much further away, or surrounded by other problems that aren't as apparent. Fixing things right off the bat is like sweeping the ice chunks off the titanic - it does nothing to fix the big problems, and you're going to wind up doing it over and over.

So, are we up to fixing it yet? Well, no. As you might have guessed from the title - we're not quite there yet. On the plus side, all this analysis will hopefully mean when we do come to the actual rewriting, you'll be itching to get your fingers back to the keyboard. But I digress - we've one more vital thing to look at before we start finding solutions. 

The woods for the trees

Throughout this process, we've been focused on details - this particular chapter, this moment of the character arc. Details are important, because without them, we don't have a story, and it's far easier to see details than it is to see some nebulous whole. But you can't fix just details - that's sweeping the proverbial ice again. What we need to do is take a look at all those details in together, and see how we can generalise them, expand them or combine them to see larger problems.

Big problems in a story are, oddly enough, much easier to tackle than a thousand tiny details. It's much easier to see when you're making things better as opposed to just different. Unfortunately, there's no by-the-numbers way of identifying the big problems like there is with the small. Here's another area where it might be really useful to have someone else (preferably a writer - they'll know what they're looking at) look at your collection of problems and chapters, and see what they can piece together. Alternatively, it's also a good time to take a break - you've found all these tiny things, but you need to get your head out of the story for a bit, out of this mindset that might keep you from seeing the connections between things.

You need to look at it from several angles (here's another reason why magical excel spreadsheets are a boon - you can code it so this is all presented for you automatically):

• chapter-by-chapter (the 'general' or main problem for each chapter)
• act-by-act
• your tension, pacing, foreshadowing, theme development and structure as a whole (over the whole novel)
• each individual storyline (considered across the whole novel)
• all the storylines as a whole
• each individual character arc (considered across the whole novel)
• all the character arcs as a whole

You should find recurring themes in your 'main problems' - things that are either common issues for you as a writer, or major weakpoints in your novel.

Pivotal problems

Now you have a whole lot of small problems, and several large, general issues to consider. What you need to find now are the connections between them. The see-saws, the links, the problems that are actually being caused by other problems you've already identified. The reason that the plot is rambly here is because Jimmy's motivation doesn't ring true. The development of Annie there is flagging because that whole scene isn't really relevant or necessary. The reason the pacing isn't working in the climax is because that climax is in the wrong spot, it needs to be much earlier, which would solve that earlier bit being really tedious, too.

Your novel isn't just a series of chapters following another, it's an interconnected organism. Changing one thing will change a whole lot of other aspects - what you need to do is find the crucial levers to pull, the vital changes to make so that most of your other problems fall into line and disappear.

Don't be fooled into thinking this is easy - it takes a lot of think-power, time and patience. Often, it's a subconscious process, where you'll be working on something else entirely, and five different pieces all fit together at once, prompting mad scribbling of the idea before it runs away.

Once again, we're not looking for solutions, yet. If they occur, then note them down somewhere, but remember those solutions are quite likely to be ice-sweepers without the whole picture. Solving a particular issue might cause other problems, or might not work with the solution for a much larger problem. What we need to know is exactly which problems we need to solve, and which will be fixed by the solving of the previous. Then we can find some answers.

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