First I have to say how much I love the way James Scott Bell talks about writing and that I highly recommend his books. He explains things in a way that click with me.
One of the things he like to talk about is the death struggle. This is the conflict that locks the protagonist and the antagonist together for the length of the story. Now literary/character driven writers need not call foul. This struggle isn’t always a physical death. It can also be psychological (think Holden Caufield or any romance novel) or professional (think police/lawyer stories, even mother trying to help/rescue her child). And yes a story can be more than one, which brings me to my point.
I was doing really with my revision for awhile. I studied my story and identified things to move around to make it more exciting and character relationships and conflict to mine to make it more meaningful. I went through scene by scene and figured out how to make it better or if it should be cut, moved or combines with other scenes. I rewrote my synopsis several times, adding new ideas as I thought of them and determining how to fit them in. I started the rewrite getting all the way through the first major change in my main character’s life.
I went to a writer’s conference in March and the main goal that I came away with was to be more methodical with my revision. I can’t tell you the number of times that I had a new idea that changed everything in the middle of a revision thus necessitating a revision of the revision. I have no desire to rewrite large portions of my novel multiple times. I don’t want to be unrealistic–some of that is bound to happen, but my goal was to keep it to a minimum.