Separated, Together, Separated Again #IWSG
Egads! It’s March already. Since it’s the first Wednesday of the month, it means today is Insecure Writer’s Support Group day.
I have an event in my book (*gasp* who would have thought of that?), and it’s giving me grief. I’m presently working on my fifth version of it. Not revisions where it’s just tweaking and editing, but an actual, straight up different version. It should be simple. The ground breaks and the character gets separated from his friend. For versions one and two, it was an earthquake, which I had to remove. After removing it, I had the character’s power that ripped energy from the ground, destabilizing it. Then a beta reader told me she didn’t see the point of one of the earlier chapters. With a sigh, I tried a different version, where I combined two chapters into one and succeeded in making my critique group say WTF. I tweaked it some more, felt it was sufficient, and moved on.
Unfortunately, by combining those two chapters, I cut out time between events that was previously used to indicate a minor character was attracted to the POV. As I moved forward, I realized I’d lost my opportunity to bring it up in a natural way, therefore what I had planned for later in the book simply wouldn’t work. And gosh darn it, I want it to work.
So here I am, on version 5, breaking it out into two chapters once again. This time, it won’t be his power ripping up the ground, it’ll be something else.
*sigh* Am I insecure? Yeah. A part of me wonders if I should use the earthquake to separate the POV from his friend. But if I do that, I would have to throw out six chapters and reorder my timeline. I don’t want to do it, I don’t know how I’d do it, but that voice inside my head is nudging me in that direction. GAH!
Have you ever struggled with an event in your story? How did you get past it? Does your gut ever tell you to rewrite everything?
About Insecure Writer’s Support Group
You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.
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