Don't Fall In Love With Your Own Words

When I'm writing, I'm working hard to get the picture in my brain down on the page into words.  I don't know how it works for other writers, but for me, it's like I see separate scenes in my head.  I can see these scenes between the characters with perfect clarity and then the work comes in when I have to link them together and figure out why my character just said that because what the hell does it mean?!  That's just the way it works for me.

Stories percolate for a long time in my gray matter before they make it onto the page.  So some of those scenes have been living in my brain for months and months before they come to fruition.  This is both good and bad.  It's good because I know by that point exactly what brought my characters to that point and I know exactly what to write.  It's bad, though, because after having lived with them for so long, I find myself a little bit in love with it and I don't want to change it.  At all.  I have to make myself do it, remind myself that it needs to be different for the story.  I need to change the scene to fit the story, not change the whole story to fit one scene.  Because when I do that (yes, I have tried it) the story as a whole does not work well.

What's the point of this diatribe?  I came to the brilliant conclusion today that I need to completely rewrite Jamie and Shane's story.  OK.  Not completely.  But Jamie, in particular, needs to be less neurotic and more real.  Otherwise, the rest of the story seems forced.  Seems too much deus ex machina and that is one of  my really big pet peeves.  Its fiction, yes, and that means it doesn't have to have the same rules as the real world.  But it has to be believable as well.  So there needs to be a change.

Needless to say, when I had this epiphany (walking back to my desk from break time) my steps faltered and my heart broke a little.  I had a mad scramble to see what else I could change about the remaining book so that my scenes could still stay as they were.  It didn't work.  It wouldn't be real. 

Don't fall in love with your own words or else you'll never be able to change them.

Too late.  

It needs to be done and I'm going to do it, but that doesn't mean it won't hurt.