Discussion: Manuscript Challenges

Photo credit: Nico Kaiser

Every manuscript has it's own challenges. That's a writing truthism that has remained true for me, even now, too many manuscripts later.

In Beyond the Red, my main challenge was getting Kora, one of my POV characters, to open up, and to set a strong world building foundation. In Into the Black it was balancing the plot arcs of my two POV characters. Now in The Rising Gold, with 45k words written and two-thirds of the plot left to go, I strongly suspect word count is going to be my biggest challenge especially given I usually add 10-20k in revisions, which is a new problem I haven't faced before.

It's a strange thing, to face completely new challenges after having written so many manuscripts. You'd be tempted to think that at a certain point, the challenges you'd face would be similar manuscript to manuscript, but thus far, at least, that largely hasn't been the case. Sure, I almost always have to add a bunch of world building to revisions because I don't usually cover nearly enough of it while first drafting, but even beyond that every manuscript tends to arrive with its own host of problems.

In a way, it's refreshing—the process of writing a book never gets old, because every book you write has a new set of challenges to face. And it's also a reminder of how we're continuously learning—or at least, should be.

So I'm curious: what manuscript challenges have you faced?

Twitter-sized bite:

What manuscript challenges have you faced? Join the discussion on @Ava_Jae's blog. (Click to tweet)