So, there was this scene.

It had some good stuff in it–a line of dialogue I liked, a conversation that needs to happen at some point–but the scene, as a whole?  It was awful.  The kind of awful one writes when you’re just too tired to be at the keyboard, and you sink into silly wish-fulfillment.  It read, honestly, like RPG-based fanfic.  Bleah.

Yesterday I opened twitter up and read some of the people I like.   One of them is Chuck Wendig, who, if you don’t know, is a writer, and also writes a lot of profanity-laden, kick-you-in-your-teeth writing advice on his blog.  Yesterday on twitter were a series of posts (link goes to a storify version of them) about daring to change direction.  And, reading them, my brain flash-fired on a new scene and chapter that would make the story better, AND get my protagonist to a place, and a confrontation, I need him to be in that works better than what I had planned.

So this morning I copy and pasted the parts I liked into a folder I keep in my Scrivener project called “Snips.”  The Snips folder is for those bits of prose that work in a scene that otherwise doesn’t, or bits of text I wrote out of sequence and haven’t found a place for yet. Some of the snips will find their way back into the book, some won’t.  Maybe some will find their way into a future book.  We’ll see.  Anyway, I did the copy/paste, and then I took a snapshot (it’s a Scrivener thing) of the project, took a deep breath, and deleted 1,650 words.  Then I whimpered, went to the break point, and started writing.

And damned if it isn’t flowing better than it has in weeks.

Thanks, Chuck.