Finished! and now what do I do?

Stephen King, the king of compulsive reading!

Today I finally finished working out the ratio of positive to negative content of the last chapter of my personal story of transforming depression into happiness.  (You didn't think I'd finished the book, did you?  No, that's a long way off.  Sigh.)

Now I'm faced with a dilemma.  Or two.  The first is that I've got far too much grey matter - not brains, unfortunately, but negative content in my chapter.   I'm aiming for a ratio of three happy yellow lines to every 1 grey depressing line, and I haven't achieved even a 2:1 ratio.  So it's back to editing.  Oh, joy.

The good news is that this exercise has made it much clearer what I need to edit.  I need less grey, depressing material.  Not more yellow, happy material, as the chapter is already three times as long as it should be!  I have said in the past that the only way I know to edit is to add more, but this time that's not a possibility.  I'm writing a book, not an encyclopedia!! So words must be discarded, much as it pains me to do it.  I need to cull 169 lines to get the right ratio.  Wbich - let me tell you - is easier said than done.  I love every word I write so much I find it agony to kill any of them.

Which brings me to the second dilemma.  I find the grey material more interesting than the yellow, because it's more dramatic.  Strangely enough, my biggest challenge in writing about my experience of happiness has been making it sound interesting!  Drama is popular for a reason - because it's compelling.  I've compensated as much as I can by 'Stephen Kinging' my story, i.e. building in heaps of hooks to keep people reading (more on this in a future post).  But is that enough to outweigh the positive to negative ratio issue?  I think I better err on the side of caution here and get the ratio at least 3:1.  So it's back to the drawing board.  Sigh.