In addition to finding that I’d written my new next-door neighbor, name and all, into the book I’m revising more than two years before I met her, this review of the book has taught me a lot of things. One of them is that the advice to let a draft rest before you go back to work on it is really sound. You discover so many things when the book isn’t fresh in your mind, when you don’t remember why you wrote something a certain way.

One thing I’ve discovered because of this is the way that story elements can linger, even after you’ve removed them. In my earliest draft of this book, I’d given my hero a flaw, a fear that he’d have to overcome in order to prevail and achieve his goals. I ended up cutting this fear in later drafts because I never could come up with a way to make it relevant in the climax of the book. There were other things the hero learned, but this fear wasn’t an issue for him. I tried to keep this fear as just a character trait, a quirk like Indiana Jones and his fear of snakes — it doesn’t really affect the plot, and there’s never something he doesn’t manage to do because of snakes, but the fear raises the stakes because we know just how much he’s struggling. And then I realized I was devoting way too much time to something that ended up being less and less relevant as I worked through the story (he didn’t have to face his fear to get to the thing he wanted, unlike Indy finding that the Ark was surrounded by snakes).

But traces of it remained even when I cut the direct references. I’d structured the opening scene in a way that would ramp up the tension because of this fear, and that structure remained. Without the fear, I realized there was no point to this structure. It was only when I let the book rest for a while that this became obvious to me. When I didn’t remember why I did it that way, I was able to look at the structure objectively and wonder why I had that extra step in the scene that didn’t need to be there.

There are a few other parts in the book where the hero is reluctant to do the thing he used to fear. I’d deleted the reference to the fear, but I’d left in the reluctance and the internal conflict about it.

It was only through thinking about all this that I finally realized why I was never able to make the fear work in the climax of the story: He overcomes this fear in the opening scene. This is a fear he has to face down all the time, and he does the thing even though it’s unpleasant (again, like Indy and the snakes). There’s no suspense at the end whether he’ll be able to do that thing in the climax of the story. We know he can do it, even if he hates it. But there would have been no story at all if he hadn’t been able to overcome the fear in the opening scene. He wouldn’t even have been in the opening scene if he hadn’t overcome that fear previously.

I think it would have been a fun character quirk, but there were a lot of other things that were more important to incorporate into the story and it was already way too long, so I didn’t have room to weave in something that ended up not mattering, and there’s not even a critical moment where that fear raises the stakes for something the hero has to do, where his goal and his fear are in conflict and we know he’ll go for the goal, but it’s going to be unpleasant (like the snakes around the Ark).

The other thing letting something rest is good for is spotting jokes that don’t work. I’ll come across a line that makes no sense, and only after reading it a few times do I remember that I put that in as a joke. If I don’t get my own joke, it has to go.