When You Know You Wrote It Right
Finn reaches out, taking my hand. “Come on,” he says.
He pulls me back over to the bench, where he spreads one of our blankets down so we have a warmer seat.
“We need to turn our backs to the fire,” he says. “If we want the best view.”
I sit as he directs, making room for him on the blanket beside me as he pulls the other blanket over our shoulders. My stew has cooled off, but I don’t care. The coffee is still hot, and just as we’re finishing the last of our dinner, it begins.
The first wash of color streaks the sky, rolling across in a wave of brilliant green, shimmering into a yellow-orange and then streaming out to the horizon, where it fades into pinks and purples. As it dies out, another wave takes its place, then another, playing across the sky in colors so fierce and fiery, they take my breath away . . .
That’s an excerpt from one of my favorite chapters in DREAMER. The main character, Jessa, and her love interest, Finn, are taking in the northern lights in an alternate reality surrounded by extinct animals that live in a wildlife preserve.
The scene was not in the original draft. The latest round of edits on the book came in from my editor, and between two chapters she wrote that I needed a bonding moment – something to show Jessa and Finn connecting and growing closer. I scratched my head, sat down at the laptop, flipped through my ideas for romantic places, then added in a cool element from Jessa’s multiverse travel. It all clicked. The scene took me on a wonderful adventure and pretty much wrote itself, ending with a tag line that punched you right in the feels. I turned in that draft, and my editor left one comment on the chapter in her next set of notes. Three words.
This is magic.
I pull those three words out of my memory vault any time I’m feeling the angst of imposter syndrome, or I’m beating my head against a granite slab of writer’s block. See? I remind myself. I’m a writer, and a good one. I just need to trust that.
Do you have a positive writer memory that keeps you going?
