First off, let me state right off
the bat that I’m not ‘back’. I’m still working on my super-secret-super-awesome
project. Blogging is not up and running again. But I just popped in to check
for mail, make sure the fridge was still running, and that the blog hadn’t
burned down in a freak digital fire.
I didn’t plan to write a post,
honest. But while I was dealing with an issue on said
super-secret-super-awesome project, something came up, something that wouldn’t
require me to give advice, but that I wanted to talk ‘out loud’ about.
#
While recently reworking a
chapter in my super-secret-super-awesome project I made a change to an early
scene affecting the main character. I thought I’d solved a problem that had
been nagging me for ages and felt quite good about it.
And then I re-read that scene and
the few chapters around it and noticed a massive mistake had emerged. You see,
by removing one early scene, the main characters ‘path’ was redirected. This in
turn led to another scene being unnecessary, which diverted the main character even
more from a scene where he meets an important secondary character.
And if they never meet . . .
And that’s when I realised the
difficultly of rewriting, of editing, and how similar it is to the rules of time
travel.
You see, I’d plonked my size
eleven down off the track and squashed the ‘butterfly of narrative’, causing a
wave of change to spread throughout the story and undo a lot of things, until
all the characters were suddenly talking dinosaurs and the Antarctic Empire
ruled the world!!!
Like a madman using a holey
bucket to scoop water from his sinking rowing boat, I spent an afternoon with
only panic for company while trying to fix as much as I could. I couldn’t undo
the original change because it honestly didn’t belong. But I had a lot of
writing that I wanted to keep, and that I could keep . . . if I could just work
out a way to ‘bend’ things to how I needed.
#
Spoiler; I did it (though the
reader can be the final judge of that).
It was a lot of work, especially
without a Doc Brown to guide me. I’ve gone back to the planning level, the very
foundation of the story, and am moving pieces around here and there to make
sure it all fits. A lot of chapters are staying, though they’ll need a little
rewriting to accept the change.
That was a close call. Guess I’d
better head back in.
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