When Your “Perfect” Story Falls Flat
Daniel Schwabauer
I had re-written the novel, then titled Baht, in 2012, as 70,000+ words of first-person narrative. Only in writing the second-to-last chapter did I realize the book wasn’t working. Though it had a lot going for it (in my opinion, anyway), it still lacked something. It lacked oomph. Drive. A sense of compulsion. I wasn’t being pulled along by the story; I was driving the story ahead of me with a cattle-prod.