Jeannette asked Scott Hawkins:

It's been months and I'd still rather be reading about Mount Char. I was wondering, what scene were you most insecure about when writing it? I know when I write I am crippled with frustration and insecurity, particularly with heavily violent or dramatic scenes. Did you ever feel this way? Despite the book being brilliant.

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[Hi Jeannette,

Oh, gosh. All of them, pretty much? I'm being totally serious.

The one I agonized over the most is pretty easy to pick--the rape scene. Over and above the difficulty of writing the scene itself, around the time I was working on it, one of the luminaries of the fantasy field blogged about how a) you should never have a heroine get raped and b) you should extra-special never do it if you're a male writer. She made some painfully good points, not least of which was that it's a cliche.

So I tried writing a bunch distinct versions of that one, ranging in levels of ghastliness from "something else happened" to a couple that were quite a bit more graphic than what ended up being published. Pro tip: having her recount the events after the fact made it a lot less punishing to read.

After I got an agent I talked it over with her. She agreed that it could be toned down a bit, but her position on the "cliche" argument was that it was a cliche because it works. I wasn't getting anywhere good with the "something else happened" versions, so that's what we ended up going with.

Believe me when I say that was not something I did lightly. Even to this day I'm still not completely comfortable with that scene.

In more general terms:

One thing that helps me sometimes is to just tear a scene up and start from scratch. I mean it literally--start with a blank page, don't copy/paste anything. I usually do at least two "from scratch" versions of every single scene.

The theory here is that you'll remember the stuff that worked from version #1 when you're writing version #2. The stuff that didn't work gets dropped and (hopefully) replaced by something better. It doesn't take as long as you'd think, and I feel like you keep a stronger narrative line through the scene the second or third time you go through it. You know what comes next so the transitions are smoother and you can drop in little hints about what's coming? Maybe? Anyway the end result feels stronger to me.

> I know when I write I am crippled with frustration and insecurity

Funny you should bring this up. Over the last week or two I've been swapping emails with a couple other first novelists. Every single one of us independently mentioned that we're crippled with anxiety and that the second novel is harder than the first. (hide spoiler)]

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