It's done.  Eight pages of tightly typed notes.  A new structure to my novel.  The invisible character now suddenly not only visible but stronger, fully formed, and a much more terrifying and riveting presence than before, complete both physically and emotionally.  I've worked so hard on this that I can even tell what he's doing when he's not on the page.
Working doggedly at the opposing POV and wrestling with plot points until I was almost banging my head against the wall, I have succeeded in taking this novel where I wanted it to go - at least in note form.  
​There were always two main problems:

• I couldn't see the second main character as I was stuck inside the head of the main character (a problem with writing so intently in the first person)
• There was no inciting incident before the Act II climax

By making copious notes of the 2nd main character entirely from his POV, I was able to solve multiple problems.  With a much deeper understanding of his character, the inciting incident appeared easily out of nowhere.  It as if it was always there, waiting to be found!

So there is a lot to be said for standing back, going through the novel with a fine tooth-comb and making pages and pages of notes.  I sometimes found myself thinking on the page and the notes themselves are an unholy mess.  I ended up making notes of notes to put some order into them.  But now it's done.  I sat back on Thursday and realised - you've got it.  This is the novel.  The story is there at last.

I just have to write it now.

I've finally figured out a way to tackle my second main character.  As my novel is in the first person and essentially has only two characters, it has been almost impossible to get into the head of the character that ISN'T the first person.  Everything the narrator says or does just bounces off the other character, so everything ends up being a reaction and there's no depth.  I've been troubled by this character since the beginning of the novel - or, at least, since he turned up in the novel (in chapter 12, I think it was)(before that, he was mentioned, so the reader knows he's coming).  I've found it almost impossible to get into his skin.  The fact that he is male has nothing to do with it - more of my stories are told from a male point of view than not, so this was not the issue.  My first draft fell to pieces because I had failed utterly to really understand this character and the 2nd draft has gone the same route - I couldn't figure out the conflict between the two characters, I couldn't figure out his personality, I couldn't understand why the things he did made no sense.  Considering that he's one half of a two-hander novel, this was a serious problem!  I've never had so much trouble developing a character.  My previous novels were action-packed and had many points of view and it was much easier to get inside a character's head when they were very busy doing stuff and doing it with other people.  My two characters in this novel are isolated to the extreme and there is no action at all......except perhaps the sex, which so far is hardly better than porn.
HOWEVER!  I've at last found a way.  I've abandoned my novel for the moment and am concentrating entirely on getting this character's act together.  I tried writing up his past (everything that happens before the novel begins) in a story form, told in first person, but that went awry too.  So I'm doing it my favourite way:

• Using bullets to separate ideas

I'm now onto my third page of bullets and that's just the before-the-novel-starts stuff!  I also managed to work out what drives him, what fuelled his hatred.  Everything I'd come up with was just wishy-washy and inspiration wasn't striking.  One can sit around for days hoping that inspiration will strike in the usual odd place (on the bus, in the bath, before you go to sleep) but as this wasn't happening, I just sat down, every day, to work as usual, and hammered at the point and looked at it from every angle.  It took four days of bashing at air, it seemed, when finally I looked at the mess of notes I had written and realised that, yes, actually, I had done it and there had been no fanfare.  It had been in front of me all along, I just hadn't seen it because I needed to view everything from a different point of view, and the only way to do this was just to make notes and make notes and make notes.  I wrote down the facts and kept writing down the facts until the facts gave the answer:  the character is in pain.  It's pain that drives him.  It's so bloody obvious now that I've worked that out.
I'm now ready to go through every single scene in the book between him and the first person and make notes on what HE is thinking, what HE does between these scenes, what HE knows and she doesn't.  When I'm done, the novel will at last have its sails.

I've been working on Chapter Sixteen for two whole weeks now.  And with half term getting in the way, it's not likely that I'll finish it for another two weeks.  It has a huge long conversation in it which is vital for everything that happens afterwards and I've already worked on it at great length before.  Each time I think I've got it right and each time I realise it's lame.  You'd think that a bit of talking and information exchange would be easy to write but every tiny nuance of emotion has to be precisely correct.  Keeping out of clichéd waters is immensely difficult too and steering clear of those nasty adverbs (she said angrily) a constant threat.  The conversation is pages long in what appears will be the longest chapter too.  I'm starting to wonder if I'm ever going to get it right.

I recently guest blogged on Page to Pixels about the complexities of a second draft - to read the blog, follow this link:

http://pagetopixels.co.uk/writing-tips/the-complexities-of-your-second-draft-and-how-to-cope-with-it/

I hurt my foot last week so all my plans for the last few days of my annual leave have been ruined, rather.  I can't go back to work either, which I'm suddenly longing to do because the problems of my life are so gargantuan (or they feel that way to me) that playing with dusty books seems like quite a lot of fun.  Needless to say, working in a library (trolleys with books, big piles of books, lugging books, climbing ladders with books.......) and a sore foot don't go together.  Since I've run out of money this month and can't go anywhere, my only escape is working on my second draft.  And it's going well - not brilliantly, but well.  I still can't work out my male character but have realised I'm going to have to do that on the page.  I have had a few flashes of inspiration regarding other problematic areas in the novel.  The best one was working out the conflict between my lovers.  Inspiration came to me while I was on the cross-trainer at the gym, listening to Marilyn Manson on my iPod.  Yes, thanks, just when there's no paper handy......fortunately, I managed to remember the important bits until I got home and could write them down.  Unfortunately, I think it was on the cross-trainer that I may have hurt my foot.  Which leads me to believe that for everything you get given, something else gets taken away.  In the last week, I've been quite desperate to crawl into a world of magic to get away from so much pain and frustration and hardship.
I just don't know where that world is.

• Approach with a fresh perspective:  this is a mighty difficult skill to perfect.  Taking some time off helps.  Not thinking about writing at all for several weeks helps too.  I took about three weeks off to proofread something else so that I could forget about my novel entirely.
• Keep a copy of the old draft:  this is for peace of mind as well as being able to check the first draft if you think you've changed too much.  I've just realised I've forgotten to do this and will have to copy the original chapters from one of three memory sticks I use.
• Slash with vigour:  anything that is even slightly wrong, chop it out, whether it's a bad description, a superfluous paragraph or a dull scene.  If your attention wanders then the reader's will too.  I spent ages researching my heroine's clothes and what sort of boots would be appropriate - and nearly died of boredom while reading it, so whittled it down to about three words rather than half a page.
• Don't be afraid of drastic changes:  I've changed the way my heroine looks and she's suddenly much more alive on the page.  I felt rather sorry to see my original heroine go but it just wasn't working - she was the wrong flavour entirely for the novel.  Anyway, I can always resurrect those particular features in another story somewhere else, so it's not like she's died.
• The reader's point of view:  I virtually never think about the reader.  This is a terrible fault of mine.  Although, actually, I do think of the reader when I long for them, when I want to share my ideas with them, but when I'm actually writing, what readers like isn't something that concerns me.  With my first draft dead on the page, I had to change this attitude entirely.  I was being subtle to the point of bland and even I wouldn't want to read anything where the drama sits so far under the skin you can barely see it.  So with that in mind, that the reader would probably like to see a bit more ACTION, I'm trying to do just that.  (I'd better go and look at that dull chapter 4 again....)
• MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL:  take yourself out the novel.  I don't know how else to put this.  I tend to sink into my writing so that I'm so far inside the character's head that I am the character.  I feel everything they do and find my days mirroring theirs, which can be a tad spooky.  This worked during very intense scenes when writing the first draft, but not all of the novel is intense.  I need to be able to stand back and allow my heroine some freedom to be herself because not everything she thinks/says/does is what I would think/say/do.  Most writers don't seem to have this problem.  They're able to produce characters which are quite unlike themselves - they're inventing people.  I tend to BE the people I write, rather than invent them.  It says much that my secondary characters are often more believable (in my eyes anyway.)  This probably just means I'm  bad writer.  Or a self-centred one.  Or too personal.  Or too autobiographical.  Or maybe it's just the way I write.

I should say that this is probably the first time I've ever actively gone from writing the first draft, stopping just moments before the Big Reveal, and sitting down consciously to write a second draft.  In the past I've worked on sections when needed, going back when something doesn't work, reworking when something fails.  But then I've never had an entire novel fail on me before so this is a new experience.  I'm having to invent ways of approaching this second draft.  A lighter touch might be the key.