I had a post, but Joomla decided to eat it, as it does every so often. And rewriting posts always strikes me like I'm repeating myself, I get impatient and stroppy. More than usual, I mean. I can't believe there's no "undo" function on the internet. But here goes.

The rundown is: I've been tweaking the plot of my novel for months, trying to get it to work. It kept feeling contrived and forced. Sometimes those 'tweaks' seemed to be major revisions, as in they'd require substantial rewriting of a lot of scenes. But I realised the other day, while thinking about le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, that I'd missed something major.

I wrote a while ago about keeping one thing sacred in your novel, and everything else being mutable. I'd forgotten that. There were aspects of my plot that I wrote in months ago as filler - they were "Until I think of something better" stand-ins. Trouble was, when I redesigned the story again and again, they hung on, until they'd worked their way into the central conceit. And I could no longer see that they didn't need to be there at all.

They were lame. They didn't work. And I couldn't make them work, because the novel didn't need to be 'tweaked'. It needed for me to burn the plot down to the ground and start again.

So I did. I threw out those aspects of the plot with a certain amount of glee. I thought about what it was about Earthsea that worked for me so much as a novel, and while i was looking and the shredded remains of my plot ideas, I saw it - the emotional centre of the novel. It felt right.

I still don't have much of a plotline. There are some major gaps and holes and things to wrangle out. But I feel like now I have the heart of what this story is.

It can be hard to see the rules we make for ourselves of what our stories are about. They turn into assumptions, like gravity and oxygene - invisible. We just walk on the ground and breathe air and don't even think about it. But they can kill a novel, if you don't look out for them.