It’s only four scenes, 4 little scenes. All of them ranging between 1 and 3 pages long. How hard could that be? Of course, I can bang out a page of text between two people…..(I can hear experienced authors laughing already.)
It may be four little scenes, but in this particular chapter, each one of those scenes plays a critical role in character development, story structure and clues to the overall puzzle. So much rides on each scene, it’s amazing how much is piled on top of them.
Then there is tone, emotional turmoil, a horse with no speaking parts but is still an intricate part nonetheless and less we forget to toss in the beauty of the landscape.
Whenever I took a writing course, no one taught us to “write”…. We were assigned an essay, a story, a poem, over and over and I guess there was a presumption of blindly improving? No idea but I never learned a thing. Decades later, I do learn but by reading the turmoil of other writers in FB groups. I read other budding authors, professional authors and curious on seekers and their conversations. It gives me something to go one and at least I learn Im not alone.
But these 4 scenes are holding up all the chapters that come afterwards. I’ve been at them for months, have I posted about this before? After rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting, I finally got one of them down. It’s perfect. I read it and it’s streamlined, all important structural pieces are in there, the tone is perfect, the characters believable and where they should be and I love how it ends.
That scene taught me what I must do…… It’s similar to going on a drunken bender, where life is tossed aside and you and the scene exist in a parallel universe that exists only for the two of you, locked in together, rewriting, rewriting , getting closer and closer, writing version after version, printing them all out, taking this line from this version, that line from that version, until finally you type out the collaboration and there it sits on the screen, staring at your innocently as if it had been there all along and its perfect. I stare at it, so clean, so simple, so eloquent and realize it will never tell the work that went into its existence….. or why anyone ever writes a book at all….. but then I read it again and think, my goodness, I wrote that and I feel amazed with myself.