How does your novel breathe?

When I first wrote my novel, it was breathless. Katya, my protagonist, was unsettled, distracted, disoriented. Her thoughts were jagged, her memories overtook her. Visually, there was a lot of white space in the novel. Even sentences were separated by white space. The white space was as important as the text--each block of white as a gulp for air. Scenes were interrupted by flashbacks and flashbacks were interrupted by the present day events, only to continue pages later.


Then I got scared I wrote something too unconventional. A couple of reviewers told me that they felt disoriented. That it wasn't a good thing. That my scenes were too short, that my transitions weren't smooth enough.


When I first tried to make the changes--consolidated scenes, reworked transitions--I felt physically sick. I read the revised parts and I started shaking. I cried. There was almost no white space. Instead of flashbacks being indicated only by the shift to the past tense, I now had proper transitions, such as "Two months ago..." I e-mailed a friend: "This is not my novel. I hate it!"


Two days later something happened. I started appreciating the new way my novel was breathing. The breathing was still fast, but more stable. It felt right. When I told my husband about it, he said, laughing, "You've been brainwashed." I said I just started seeing it differently.


Two days ago, another friend who read my novel months ago, read my first pages again. "You lost the 'wow factor'," she said. And that was it. I have no confidence in my decision anymore. I'm in agony. I can't sleep. I'm trying to mediate and I even tried to pray--for clarity of mind. I feel I lost touch with my novel. Why am I blogging about it? Sometimes when I blog about things, something marvellous and unexpected happens. I think I'm throwing this out to the Universe and hoping that a solution will come to me. Am I done with my novel, or do I start revising again? How does my novel want to breathe?


I wish I knew.