Something terrible that happens when I write…

Sometimes, when I’m in writing mode (which I imagine looks like Sage Mode from the anime Naruto), everything just works. The characters require very little guidance – they know what they need to say and who they need to say it to and I become a kind of conduit for them. Words fly out of my fingertips not unlike lightning from the Emperor’s in Return of the Jedi. In those moments – because let’s be honest, writing that easy is only ever a momentary thing – whatever I’m working on is just about the most exciting thing I could be doing that might still be classified as ‘work’.

But then there are other moments where things are not easy or fluent like Emperor-lightning.

These kinds of moments I imagine most writers would rather forget about.  Sometimes I know exactly what I want to do with a scene or a character or a sentence but it just won’t work. It’ll take me hours to get it right. I’ll stare at the screen and write it a hundred different ways. Sometimes I’ll even write something as a placeholder, knowing that it isn’t working how I want it to, and move on… but then I might come back the next day or week and spend more hours debating what’s wrong with it and how to fix it and still end up being frustrated.

And then there are the big ones. The one’s where I write a whole lot of stuff that I think should happen. I push my characters one way or another, I encourage them into awkward forced dialogue in order to further my desires rather than theirs… And then I realise what I’ve done. I’m no longer in Sage Mode. I’ve been taken over by the demon fox and I’ve written something that doesn’t make sense – something that my character would never do.

That’s when I have to do something drastic.

I have a rule: never delete chunks of text. Cut it and paste it elsewhere – who knows if it might not become useful sometime. If I delete it, it’s gone forever. If I keep it hidden away in some secret shame document of ‘off-cuts’ I might find a use for some of it, or I will at least have this grumpy, leering reminder of the terrible crap I once had in my story.

My worst experience of this so far was when I had to remove ten-thousand words.

The chapter depicted a character (who I thoroughly enjoyed creating and developing) fighting her way across Mars to complete some petty task that had almost no bearing on the central plot. I realised, after spending weeks in this extended chapter that was full of intense combat and a potential love interest and awkward reveals about secret and terrible things that might be going on beneath the surface of the world she was on, that she would never do that kind of task. There was nothing that would fit within the plot that would give her a reason to do the things I was having her do.

So I cut it.

I pasted it elsewhere and I wrote something different.

And tonight I’ve realised that I might have to do something similar to another character that I like and whose story I desperately want to tell.