I have a love-hate relationship with Nova’s Test.
It’s a project I’ve been working on off and on for over a decade, now. It started life as a novella, and in 2018, I fleshed it out into a full-length novel. I’ve edited it through several drafts, hired a professional editor, and even tried querying it.
But I was never satisfied with it. Not really.
Which is both a hard place to be in as a writer and a familiar one.
It’s never easy to know when to stop. So many writers I know, myself included, will always find something to tweak, to fix, to word a slightly different way, no matter how many drafts a story has been through. Part of honing my writing skills has been learning to let go of perfectionism, to know when a story needs to be enough. And I generally do a pretty good job of that.
But something about Nova’s Test just never sat well with that part of me.
I was talking to a friend earlier this year about the story, and I said something that’s stuck with me: “I wrote myself out of so many corners that I created a labyrinth.”
And I came to the conclusion that I had over-complicated the story.
I’ve also been reading a lot of cozy fantasy lately, a genre that’s growing in prominence with books like Legends & Lattes and The Spellshop. I’ve really fallen in love with the genre, and the manuscript I finished last year falls firmly into that category. I’ve never quite considered Nova’s Test to be cozy fantasy, though I have wondered in the past if it could be.
So, about a month and a half ago, I let myself wonder. And try.
I sketched out an outline of what a simplified world and magic system would look like for the story and wrote out chapter summaries. Just to see if it would even work.
It did.
So there I was, faced with the difficult choice: Did I commit to continuing the story as it was, with more rounds of edits but a world that felt too big? Or did I scrap the entire magic system and at least half the world building, along with several plot points and start almost anew?
Given the title of this post, it shouldn’t surprise you to find I chose the latter.
It wasn’t an easy choice. For all that the friend I mentioned earlier likes to tease me about the number of drafts I like to do and my endless changing and tweaking, I didn’t want to take such a drastic action. But the story needed it. Even with just a one or two sentence summary per chapter, I was seeing the story come together in a way it never had. I was finally answering questions in a way that didn’t feel forced, and I was letting go of some of the standards and ideas that, on reflection, were holding me back more than they were helping the story.
As I’ve been going through this process, there have been two very prominent images and ideas in my mind: the Ugly Duckling and the Ship of Theseus.
I recently wrote about the Ugly Duckling because of this. It’s a story that’s become synonymous with the awkward growing phase of a person or thing, the idea that before becoming the beautiful thing it is meant to be, a thing might first be considered ugly. Nova’s Test has definitely had its growing pains, and I’m really starting to see the beautiful, swan-like story emerge.
The Ship of Theseus is a more obscure reference. It’s a philosophical thought experiment dating back to ancient Greece. The premise is this: If a ship belonging to Theseus is docked and kept up over the years, replacing each wooden part as it rots, is it considered the same ship once all the original parts are gone? And if not, at what point in the process is it no longer the same ship? Obviously, with such large-scale changes to my manuscript, I often find myself wondering if I’m even working on the same story any more. But, after a lot of though, I’ve come to the conclusion it is the same story. The bones and foundation are the same, even though some of the changes I’ve made are deep. The themes and arcs are unchanged.
It can sometimes feel a little disheartening to find myself so close to the beginning of the process, especially after ten years and so many other drafts. But if working as an editor has taught me anything, it’s that doing what’s best for the story sometimes means letting go of my pride.
As we move into November, I have two parallel goals for my writing. Instead of a word count, I’m challenging myself to spend at least 50 hours writing. I’m also trying to finish this new draft of Nova’s Test.
Do you have any writing goals for November? Share them in the comments below so we can cheer each other on!
Until next time, word nerds!
