It’s not because I’ve been shirking my daily writing time. If anything, I’ve become a bit of a workaholic. It’s because I have encountered a particularly demanding scene, one that obliges me to spend the bulk of my writing time in the bloody trenches of revision.
These challenging scenes pop up every now and then. They are typically crucial, pivotal scenes—fulcrum points on which the subsequent story turns in a new direction. If you get them wrong, if you even get the shadows of implications wrong, the rest of the narrative suffers enormously.
For this particular scene to pull its weight in the greater narrative, it has to perform many functions simultaneously. It has to introduce an important new character. It’s a character-heavy scene, and it has to track the actions and dialogue of all those characters at once. It has to convey multiple suspicions in the mind of the reader, some of which will end up being well-founded, and some not. It has to show cause-and-effect and propel our protagonist, Zappa, further along his arc. It has to delicately foreshadow future events in the novel. And it has to do all of that while continuing to support the novel’s theme.
I briefly considered just publishing the first draft and not worrying so much about all these nit-picky issues, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. When the universe has entrusted you with a rare and extremely potent novel seed, you have to nurture it properly.
The only answer when you come upon difficult scenes like this one is to write it, then take copious notes on it, then rewrite it, revise the notes, rewrite it again, and so on. Believe me when I say that every element—and I mean every single element, from setting to character wardrobe to dialogue—has been questioned and rehashed thus far in the laborious writing and rewriting of this scene. With each revision, improvements are made.
It’s almost there.
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