I’ve fallen into a trap that I should have seen coming. Actually, I may have seen it coming, but I’m not sure.

If you need a refresher, Pandora was a woman created by Zeus as a means of punishing mankind for Prometheus giving humans fire. As a wedding gift, he gave Pandora a jar (read box) and warned her never to open it. Zeus had created her to be curious, and she couldn’t forever resist the temptation to open her jar. She opened the jar and out rushed ills and woes and hardships and evils. Quickly she shut the jar back up, but by that time only one thing remained inside:  hope. Ever since, humankind has suffered greatly, and only the hope that remains can keep us safe. Such is the story of Pandora’s box.

So what Pandoric trap did I fall into? One of my novels was in a semi-final draft when I suffered a terrible realization. The entire second half is backwards. I’d been struggling with that part of my story the entire time, but I couldn’t figure out what the source of its problems were. Wham! The Rearrangement Games began.

I thought it would be a matter of swapping scenes and trading places. I was wrong. At first it was correct, but when you open Pandora’s jar, it’s never as simple as that. Moving “Scene O” causes “Scene P” to not make sense, and placing “Scene K” after “Scene T” means that Scenes “L,” “J,” “M” and “R” have to be rearranged as well (no placing the cart before the ox!).

The process became a disaster of epic knitting proportions where one dropped stitch early on can find your entire project completely unraveling in your amateur efforts to fix that missing stitch. On the one hand, I love the first half of said book. As in “I know it’s well written and I think it’s…cute?”

But the second half? It feels like a patchwork quilt barely held together with string. String that changes every few paragraphs.

What do you do?

You plow through until everything’s fixed and the two halves merge. And in my case, I’m vowing to futuristically prevent major reordering needs before they occur. It’s a fickle vow. I can’t see the future, but it’s a great lesson that although “first” drafts may be absolute garbage (consult any famous author’s books/words about first drafts), it can help a TON to fix structure problems when they occur, rather than putting them off until thousands of more words have been written.