Back in November, I took part in National Novel Writing Month. Between November 4th and the end of the month, I managed to put a 66k word mystery novel to paper. The title of the work eventually became An Unassuming Fall and after two edits, sat at a final word count close to 70k.

In late December, I passed the full manuscript around to a few folks for them to beta read it. So far, I’ve only gotten a single response (with a few more forthcoming), but the general review is that the work is good. Aside from a few minor issues with grammar and spelling, there was one specific thing that was suggested – that I add more suspects.

This was, at the same time, shocking and expected. At one point during the writing process, I did worry about there being too few characters in the book, but with a requirement of over 3000 words per day to finish by the end of the month, I had no choice but to keep cranking out words and stick to the outlined I had. Now that the whole work is done, I’ve had time to look back through it and can see that the “whodunit” portion of the book is relatively light on options. While I still like the main story arc of the book, I can see the critique’s validity.

That begs the question of what to do.

An Unassuming Fall is a very tight work of fiction (at least, I like to think it is). It was done that way on purpose, to keep the story moving forward at all times. Because I was trying to write a whole novel in a little under a month, I wanted each page to be as interesting for me to write as it would for someone to read. To that end, I kept descriptions to a minimum (mostly) and cut out most things that would detract from the story. At this point, adding in another character (or multiple characters) would prove to be a very difficult task. There is one specific place where I could make an edit that would take suspicion away from the people responsible for the murders. It would require a scene be added in one place and a few small edits to the man characters inner monologue on a few occasions – pretty easy to do. There is one problem, however. The character added to that scene doesn’t show up again until the end of the book and is only be mentioned off hand a few times during the intervening pages (aside from the inner monologue edits).

Of course, I could make that edit and hope that it alleviates the problem, or I could actually work on adding an extra character or two into the story. That is a whole different beast. It would require me to go through the work and find suitable places to interject another person or two. Further than that, I think it would prompt an entire rewrite – something I’m very much not interested in doing considering that the single person who finished the MS actually liked it.

I’ve given it a lot of thought and, so far, the only course of action I feel comfortable with would be adding the single edit near the beginning of the book. While the single edit is going to mess with pacing a bit (I’ve already been told that the first chapter throws a lot at the reader), it will be easier to manage a single change than a whole lot of changes throughout the entire book. In the end, this small change might result in the first chapter being split in two and the pacing messed with until everything feels right.