Big Picture Revision

Imagine you've just put together a very complicated 1000-piece puzzle. It was tricky, but you beat it. All the pieces are in place... except one. You count the pieces. There are 1000 pieces. It should be perfect, but it's not. Somehow you put the puzzle together wrong, leaving a hole where none should be.

It's time for revisions. Not polishing-the-pieces revisions. Taking-the-whole-puzzle-apart-and-putting-it-back-together revisions.

Aaack!!

That's how I feel today. I'm working on BIG PICTURE revision. That's not the line-editing type where you change out "floated" for "walked" or get rid of excess adverbs. That's the kind where you pull up full-grown sunflowers by their roots and try to replant them elsewhere.

Too many metaphors?

Sorry. I'm in BIG PICTURE revision mode, which means my brain is in creative overdrive. It's fun because I get to write completely new scenes and plug them in, or add in a sneaky character detail that I just now thought of to make my villain more present, even though he's kind of behind the scenes like Voldemort.

But as I get closer to the end, I'm getting anxious. At some point, I'll have all 1000 pieces put together again, and I'm terrified of that gaping hole that shouldn't be there. What if it's always there? What if I can't close it up with some brilliant plot twist or rational explanation?

Writer fail.

How do you organize your big picture edits so they don't sneak up on you with a million untied strings at the end?