Plowing through a rough field

Plowing through a rough field

A rural analogy applied to writing!

As a rural woman, I felt pretty cool when that came to me!

Here is your friendly neighborhood troubled loner/madwoman, reporting in.

I just had One of THOSE scenes to write.

One I knew was HARD to get right. One I knew was going to be a LOT of work, a lot of rewriting.

Novella coming in September

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Usually this happens to me when I’m coming up against an action scene. They are just difficult to get right. Tons of motion. Tons of FEELINGS. And you have to write a whole lot in such a way it doesn’t stop the action, with my tendency toward humor and asides and snarky dialogue…mostly NONE of that is appropriate in an action scene.

Well, I had such a scene but this was a little different. I wanted it to be a powerful FAITH scene rather than action scene.

There is Christian faith running through all my books. And I’m opposed to like…preaching sermons. But I had a character, a STUBBORN character who is frightened of her own shadow. A character with a very strange, confused notion of her faith. She thinks there are two Bibles. And she's afraid all the heretics who don't know about the second one can never make it to heaven. So she feels compelled to SAVE THEM at the same time all her instincts are to be a crazed recluse. Yeah, she's a fun character.

I needed to solve that. I wanted to actually HIT it hard. Bring her around.
Do it, or at least kick her down the right path, in a single scene I’d been building up to. (I'd been nudging her but it was TIME to iron this out)

And in true Mary fashion, I was ducking it.

I know I do this. I KNOW! I KNOW!!!!

But it’s weird. It’s subconscious. I have to recognize what I’m doing. Instead, I go back, rewrite scenes, revise, fiddle, brainstorm what happens at the end (I brainstorm alone! I lay (lie?) awake nights tossing ideas around like a juggler. I even have that visual in my head, juggling ideas. It’s fun.

But it took me awhile to recognize I was dodging this scene. As a matter of fact I’d written on past this scene, I was so intent of not taking the time, bleeding out the words, to get it right.

I finally noticed my avoidance and grimly faced that scene. I KNOW I CAN’T DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME!

So I dug in. I wrote it BADLY. It was too short, too unemotional, too preachy and, worst of all, I still ducked the LESSON I wanted my heroine to learn. I CAN BE SUCH A JERK.

But at least it was done. Now I rewrite. Then I write on, then force myself to go back.

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It’s still not right after about FIVE passes. But five more…then maybe.

So my advice today is to RECOGNIZE when you’re stopped, when you're (as Cate Nolen said last Wednesday) Procrastinating…it MIGHT BE, because you don’t want to tackle a HARD scene.

Get in there. Get it down. Then fix it.

Usually it grows and grows, then you cut, then you add. Remember the EMOTION in the scene. If it’s hard for ME then it’s hard for the characters and you need to see the gaping wounds of feeling pouring through the scene.

Writing all this makes me realize I need to go back. Revise AGAIN!!!

It’s not there, but at least if you get it down wrong, you can fix it. You can’t fix a blank page.

Does anyone else do this? Or, as most writers feel, am I completely alone!?