Letting Go

I’ve begun working on my 3rd WIP for the year. This is going to be a full rewrite of a story I’ve written, rewritten, entered in contests, and then realized it STILL needs to be rewritten. I think I’ve finally figured out what the problems were and how to fix them, but the fix involves letting go of a lot of things.

Any time you rewrite, you have to do some letting go. You have to get rid of scenes, plot points, ideas, characters, etc that don’t work. And each time I’ve rewritten this particular story, I’ve let go of certain things and changed certain things, but through all these rewrites I have held fast to my first scene.

It’s a scene that although not that important, starts right in the middle of some exciting action and puts the hero and heroine on the page together from page two. I thought it was enticing, intriguing, so clever. And, perhaps in another story, it might be all of those things, but in this story it was just an attention getter… not something that really integrally mattered.

So, I’m finally letting that scene go. It’s hard, because I like it. Beginnings are so hard, and I’d started in the middle of action, I’d avoided a lot of infodump, both characters were on the page together relatively quickly… it had so much right going for it… but it was still wrong for the story.

So, I’m saying farewell to that little scene… hoping I can someday use it somewhere, but if not… oh well. That’s writing sometimes, the best ideas just don’t always work.