It’s crunch season at my soulless corporate writing gig, so personal revision is proceeding at a creep.
Since the last update, the revision has reached the point at which I’d left myself a note that Heroine didn’t have to participate so much in Hero spilling his guts. He wants to tell her. He’s not lying. Hero (and readers) might construe questions as prompts to tell Heroine what she wants to hear, which she wouldn’t do while judging whether to leave him behind or leave him in pieces.
“FINE, Hero can have a few POV scenes” spares us all from a lengthy monologue broken up only by Heroine unnecessarily fidgeting and thinking about what she’s hearing. Hero gets to have memories, thoughts, and emotions apart from what he’s saying. The stakes are his: he’s been dreading this reveal from the beginning because the truth is less believable than his lies, and failure means definitely losing someone he cares about, possibly getting killed by her, and probably consigning thousands of people to endless slumber because he drove off the one person who can save them. He’ll be keenly attuned to how she’s receiving this information, and through that lens, silence and stillness could be a source of tension!
That meant rewriting the entire scene. Even the dialogue I tried to keep required prompts other than interrogation by Heroine, which changed the dialogue. More work than the “polishing” I would prefer to be doing, but the story will be stronger for it.
Since that was a major overhaul, I wrote it from scratch rather than trying to “fix” what I already had. When I went through the old material afterward to see if I’d omitted anything important, I found that much of it was no longer relevant. I have more clarity about what happened in the distant past, so I can now recognize when a line of inquiry is an unproductive tangent.
It might make perfect sense for a character in this situation to wonder about something! But if I spend 500 words indulging that, readers will assume that thing is important even if the on-page conclusion is “this doesn’t matter.” That attention creates an expectation that will never be paid off. I can prevent that brain itch by trashing information the story doesn’t require anyone to have.
Also so Heroine had something to do during that scene, I previously had her figuring out something pretty obvious Hero didn’t know about his own lived experience. Yeah, she’s very clever, we know, but what’s the goal of making Hero look clueless? If I don’t have to fill her otherwise empty time, he can actually know things about the past couple of decades of his life, and her insight can be reserved for one thing, relevant to her current task, that Hero is too close to the situation to see.
I changed checking a pulse at the wrist to checking at the neck. It was convenient in the story for Heroine to be holding the victim’s hand and prod the nearest artery, but my inner ex-healthcare worker wouldn’t shut up about it. If you have good access to the neck, it’s just a more reliable location. A lot of survivable things can go wrong in an arm to disrupt the radial pulse, but missing the carotid is generally diagnostic of death in the absence of fictional qualifiers.
I had to rearrange the order of discoveries around not holding the victim’s hand, but it was worth it to shut up Dr. Brainweasel.
We’ve reached Hero’s identity reveal, which involves his parents’ names. I remember considering at one point which parent’s surname (or combo thereof) he officially uses and the possibility he had told Heroine something else when they met. This is the last opportunity to settle that issue.
I did not, however, feel up to changing every occurrence in the preceding 130,000 words, so I stuck a note at the first use of his name for Future Me to deal with during the next revision.
Of note: I hit the 75% mark of this revision but don’t feel at all like I’m coasting on the downslope now. Bummer.
Maybe it was the amount of effort required on the approach to the goalpost. Maybe it was the wrong goalpost! Either way, I’m just going to resign myself to no easy parts with this one. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I find one and suffer no more crushing disappointment if not.
