Writing a Novel Is Like Commanding the Galactic Empire

Why your manuscript keeps rebelling and what to do when your plot blows up

I. So, You Want to Rule the Galaxy (or Write a Novel)

It begins, as many tragic ventures do, with confidence.

You’ve decided to write a novel. Not a short story. Not a gentle novella. A full-fledged, spine-bearing novel, complete with plot arcs, character development, emotional depth, and possibly a map. You’re ready. The Force is strong in you. You’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, made the playlists. You have a working title, a Pinterest mood board, and if we’re being honest, a god complex about your protagonist’s jawline.

The dream? Elegant execution. An epic narrative that unfolds with the precision of a well-oiled galactic regime. You, at the helm, orchestrating every moment with masterful control. Characters will obey. Scenes will transition smoothly. Your inciting incident will arrive on page ten like clockwork, and the climax will resolve in a blaze of satisfying symmetry.

But then… you begin.

And suddenly you’re less Emperor Palpatine and more mid-level Imperial officer frantically refreshing the error logs while the Death Star trembles.

Because writing a novel is not a show of dominion, it’s a display of resilience. It’s not commanding legions. It’s herding caffeinated stormtroopers who keep shooting each other in the foot.

The first few pages feel promising. Then your plot holes open like wormholes. Your protagonist goes rogue. A minor background character insists on a redemption arc, and you can’t remember why anyone was on this asteroid to begin with.

This isn’t failure. This is standard operating procedure.

Writing a novel feels like it should be a top-down operation, with the writer as galactic overseer. But in reality, it’s much more like trying to run the Galactic Empire from a malfunctioning star cruiser with half your staff whispering about rebellion.

And the rebellion? It’s coming from inside the plot.

So buckle up, Sith Lord. This isn’t a mission of domination, it’s a journey into chaos. But the good kind. The kind that makes stars.

II. The Illusion of Control (Otherwise Known as Plotting)

Here’s where the delusion truly takes root.

You decide (quite reasonably) that the way to maintain order in your novel-writing empire is to plot everything in advance. A solid plan. A timeline. Perhaps even a three-act structure annotated in colour-coded highlighters and backed up in the cloud, just in case inspiration gets hacked by a rival galaxy.

And for a moment, it works. You feel powerful. Strategic. Untouchable. You’re Moff Tarkin, standing smugly aboard your outline—the literary Death Star you’ve designed to conquer story chaos once and for all.

Then, somewhere around Chapter Four, it explodes.

Maybe your protagonist refuses to follow the arc you mapped for them. Maybe a minor side character mutinies and demands a subplot. Or maybe your beautifully foreshadowed twist turns out to hinge on a plot point you’ve accidentally deleted.

Your neat little structure now resembles the Millennium Falcon: barely holding together, riddled with patches, and somehow always on fire.

This is the moment most writers experience what can only be described as narrative vertigo. You had control. You had direction. And now the map no longer matches the terrain. Your story has gone full hyperspace and left your outline sobbing somewhere in a crater.

But here’s the truth most writing guides gloss over: plots are fragile.

They’re scaffolding, not stone. They’re the illusion of control in a process that thrives on discovery. And if your story starts veering off-plan? That’s not sabotage. That’s progress.

So yes, outline. Strategise. Build your Death Star. Just don’t get too attached to it. Because real storytelling often lives in the cracks—the unexpected decisions, the strange detours, the trench runs you didn’t see coming until you were already in them.

Let the structure guide you. Let the story surprise you. Just… maybe don’t install a self-destruct port right next to your theme.

III. Characters: Beautiful, Treacherous Rebels

You recover from your exploded outline, brush the plot shrapnel from your robes, and declare, perhaps prematurely, that all is not lost. You’ll regroup. You’ll adapt. You’ll simply write smarter. The plan has changed, but at least the characters will cooperate.

Oh, sweet summer Sith.

Because just when you think you’ve regained control, your characters stage a coup.

The brooding mercenary you wrote as emotionally constipated? He’s journaling now. The no-nonsense commander? Secretly in love with the droid. The villain? She’s joined a monastery, adopted a goat, and refuses to engage in Act III unless it involves inner peace and lavender farming.

Characters, bless them, are not chess pieces. They’re sentient variables in your story’s equation—more unpredictable than a bounty hunter with a personal vendetta and a jetpack. The moment they start making choices you didn’t plan for is the moment they become real. And real characters do inconvenient things. They derail scenes. They defy arcs. They mutter secrets to beta readers behind your back.

And here’s the maddening beauty of it: this is what makes your story work.

Readers don’t fall in love with perfectly behaved plot-puppets. They fall for the ones who rebel. Who surprise. Who walk off the page and refuse to come back until you rewrite Chapter Seven from their perspective and give them a better coat.

The more you try to control them, the flatter they become. Let them breathe, though, and they’ll start shaping the story in ways you didn’t anticipate—but desperately needed.

So if your characters have stopped following orders, good. You’re no longer writing propaganda. You’re leading a living, mutinous narrative—and that’s when the storytelling truly begins.

IV. Stormtroopers, Bureaucracy, and the Inner Critic

By now, your plot’s in tatters, your characters are on strike, and you’ve made peace with the idea that your story is less a streamlined galactic saga and more a soap opera unfolding in space cantinas and suspicious asteroid colonies.

But that’s fine. You’re resilient. You’ve accepted the chaos. You’ve even grown fond of it.

Then, just as you sit down to make sense of it all, a new adversary arrives.

Not a character. Not a plot twist.

Worse.

Your own brain.

It starts subtly. A whisper of doubt. A flicker of hesitation. Then, like a bored Emperor Palpatine with a mic and nothing better to do, your inner critic pulls up a throne and begins a running commentary:

“This scene is pointless.”

“No one talks like that.”

“Do you even know what a character arc is, Dave?”

And just like that, your once-bustling creative galaxy is locked in administrative review. Every sentence requires a committee. Every paragraph is a diplomatic incident. You’ve become the overworked Imperial officer trying to file a plot report while twenty stormtroopers argue over font settings.

This is the bureaucracy of self-doubt. And it’s relentless.

Suddenly, writing feels less like building a world and more like applying for planning permission to imagine anything at all. You spend longer renaming files than writing them. You convince yourself the story was better in your head, where no one could critique its dialogue, or pacing, or suspicious lack of indoor plumbing on desert planets.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: every writer becomes their own obstacle eventually. That critical voice? It’s not an enemy, but it is terribly timed. Its job comes later, during revision. Right now, you need the other part of you—the one that dares to draft, to guess, to fumble. The side that isn’t worried about whether this space heist scene “advances the theme” but just wants to see what happens when a goat steals the spaceship.

So let the critic nap on its throne for now. It’ll get its moment. But not yet.

Right now, you’ve got a galaxy to rewrite.

V. The Force vs. The Dark Side: Drafting with Intuition

At this point, you’ve weathered betrayal from your plot, rebellion from your characters, and a full-blown insurrection from your own brain. And yet—somehow—you’re still writing.

And now you’re standing at the edge of the real divide: the Force… or the Dark Side.

The Force, in this case, is your creative instinct. That raw, unfiltered flow of storytelling energy that propels you forward even when you’ve no idea where you’re headed. The part of you that writes scenes out of order, lets metaphors run feral, and occasionally forgets whether your protagonist has one sibling or three. It’s messy. It’s wild. It doesn’t care about structure. And it’s glorious.

But then… the Dark Side beckons.

It whispers seductive promises of clean prose, airtight plots, and thematic consistency. It tells you to stop. To fix that clunky sentence before you go any further. To rewrite the first chapter again because this time, this time, you’ll get it right. It tells you that a perfect novel can be drafted in a single pass… if only you try hard enough.

You’ll be tempted. We all are.

But perfectionism is not your ally—it’s a Sith Lord in sensible shoes, strangling your momentum with a red pen. It doesn’t fuel creativity. It audits it. And if you listen too long, you’ll find yourself in creative stasis: endlessly tinkering with Chapter One while Chapters Two through Twenty rot in the cargo hold of good intentions.

The truth? Drafting a novel requires faith. Not in the plan. Not in the market. Faith in the process. In the notion that clarity comes later. That a bad sentence today is better than a brilliant one you never write. That your first draft isn’t the final product—it’s the fuel for it.

So trust the Force. Write the wild thing. Let your story stumble and stretch. Get the tone wrong. Misjudge a character. Include the subplot about space goats. That’s how you find the heart of your book—not by avoiding mess, but by writing through it.

Perfectionism might build empires, but creativity starts in the rebellion.

VI. Blowing Up the Death Star (And Building Another One)

Eventually—sometimes mercifully, sometimes with a scream muffled by a cushion—you reach the end of your first draft.

And what lies before you?

Wreckage. Glorious, sprawling, incoherent wreckage. Half the scenes contradict each other. A character you killed in Chapter Seven inexplicably reappears in Chapter Fifteen wearing a hat. The climax involves a decision your protagonist no longer has any motivation to make. And there’s an entire subplot involving a talking locket that no longer connects to anything, but still feels oddly important.

This is not a disaster. This is the job.

Because writing a novel isn’t just about building—it’s about rebuilding. Not once. Not neatly. Not with a fanfare and ceremonial robes. But with the grim, determined glee of someone who’s blown up their Death Star and is now elbow-deep in debris, muttering, “Right. Let’s do that better.”

Revision is where the novel actually happens.

It’s where you step back, squint at the carnage, and start asking useful questions:

What am I really trying to say here?

Where does the story breathe?

Why does this chapter read like it was written by a sleep-deprived raccoon?

You cut the clutter. Rearrange the scenes. Strip out the soggy exposition and keep the lines that pulse with life. It’s part editing, part archeology. You’re digging through the noise to find the bones of something honest.

And yes, it’s hard. It takes longer than you want. You’ll rewrite scenes three times and still hate the ending. But then, one day, a line you wrote months ago, one you barely remember, will leap out of the rubble and sing.

That’s the moment. That’s the rebuild. And that’s why you keep going.

So don’t mourn the messy draft. Honour it. It gave you the blueprint for the story that’s really trying to be told.

And if you’re rebuilding from ruins? You’re in good company.

Most published novels are Death Star 3.0, quietly built from the wreckage of previous drafts, glinting with polish, but held together by duct tape, rewrites, and unreasonable amounts of tea.

VII. Final Thoughts: Long Live the Rebellion

So here you are. Deep in the heart of the writing process, surrounded by the smouldering wreckage of drafts past, your plot rebuilt more times than the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive. And somehow, miraculously, you’re still writing.

This isn’t failure. This is the work.

Writing a novel isn’t about pristine execution or unbroken control. It’s not a dictatorship of ideas enforced by rigid outlines and sentence-level tyranny. It’s about navigating a galaxy of uncertainty with courage, curiosity, and maybe a half-decent metaphor now and then.

And if your characters have rebelled? Good. It means they’re alive.

If your plot has imploded? Excellent. You’re discovering the real story now.

If your first draft looks like it was stitched together by caffeinated Ewoks during a blackout? Perfect. That means you wrote it.

Because this, this glorious, frustrating, incandescent mess, is how novels get made. Not in the pristine halls of theoretical perfection, but in the trenches. With red pens. With rewrites. With a refusal to give up when everything you’ve built comes crashing down.

So, embrace the rebellion. Welcome the rewrites. Build your next Death Star with better exhaust ports and a tighter subplot. And remember: the best novels aren’t born—they’re forged.

You’re not failing because it’s hard.

You’re doing it right because it is.

Now go. Trust the force. Tell your story. Light the spark.

And may the drafts be with you.