Heart Bones

by Colleen Hoover

This scene is the reason I pushed the release date back. I had originally written this scene with Beyah and her father visiting Samson together. Samson was a completely different person in this scene. He was mean to Beyah. Mean to Beyah's father. He thought pushing her away would make her angry enough to leave him and go to college. This was actually one of the first scenes I wrote in this whole book. I based the entire book around this scene, and when I finally got to it, it just didn't sit right with me. I had to put the book down for a week after finishing it and walk away from it and come back to it with fresh eyes. Sometimes a writer can be so married to a scene, it's hard to divorce it and throw it out of the book, or change it to where it's unrecognizable. But I needed Samson to be true to his character in this moment more than any other. He wouldn't have acted the way I originally wrote the scene. It didn't align with his character and it made the rest of the book harder to accept. So I pushed the due date, rewrote this scene and ended up rewriting everything that came after it. I'm very happy I did that. Sometimes it takes walking away, not writing, and then coming back with a fresh set of eyes to see where you went wrong.