![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/puzzling.jpg\" "\\"puzzling\\"")
Last week, I reached a place in my manuscript where I didn\u2019t like the conversation my characters were having.\u00a0 It was trivial boy-girl chatter, and nothing was happening: no trouble, no relationship development.\u00a0 It bored me. \u00a0I stepped back to question if the scene was worth revising or if it needed to be in the book, and it didn\u2019t.\u00a0 So I read ahead to see where danger in the story made me excited again, and it was a good twenty pages further along.<\/p>\n
How, I wondered, had this dud section ever been tolerable to me?<\/p>\n
I cut out a chunk of manuscript and looked into the hole.\u00a0 It was a dark, shadowy place, this hole.\u00a0 Now I needed to get from point J to point N, but I needed a new K-L-M to get me there.\u00a0 First-drafting the patch meant bringing forward part of the story I\u2019d kept at the edge.\u00a0 It required developing a routine in my fictional world, developing backstory for the main character, and complicating her relationships.\u00a0 Even with all these changes, my main character still ended up in a dud conversation over dinner, and the dialogue was murder to write.\u00a0 I would advance through a couple of exchanges, delete them back, and advance forward again.\u00a0 Even as I was writing the scene, I suspected I would end up cutting it, but I needed to write it anyway, like I needed to torture myself.\u00a0 It took me hours to get just a few pages, and they were bad.\u00a0 Painfully so.<\/p>\n
The next morning, when I started again, I saw I could make problems worse (the plot better) by cutting the entire dinner conversation scene.\u00a0 Yay, and I saw how to go forward, too.<\/p>\n
Writing is the strangest process.\u00a0 Somehow I have to work on the stuff that will be cut in order to reach the stuff that will develop.\u00a0 It\u2019s true on so many scales right now, in the over-arching shape of the novel, and within an act, and within a scene.\u00a0 I am fascinated by this project, and lost to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week, I reached a place in my manuscript where I didn\u2019t like the conversation my characters were having.\u00a0 It was trivial boy-girl chatter, and nothing was happening: no trouble, no relationship development.\u00a0 It bored me. \u00a0I stepped back to question if the scene was worth revising or if it needed to be in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3],"tags":[246,37],"class_list":["post-2486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","category-writing","tag-project-next","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2486"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2491,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486\/revisions\/2491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}