I’m back to rewriting the book I’ve been working on, off and on, for much of the year, and I think the break to revise another book was good for me because I had a nice breakthrough. The other night, something I was reading gave me an idea that might apply to my book. It would certainly add conflict to the story and make things more difficult for my character. But as I thought about it, I decided that it would really just add conflict to a part of the book that didn’t need it, that’s only a transition point, and it would mess up a lot of other things in the story.

Yesterday morning when I was trying to figure out the heroine’s character arc, I found myself thinking about it again. It occurred to me that it would actually add conflict to the ending, too. Maybe I needed to consider this idea. So I made a pro/con list about making this change, and I came up with about a page of pros and only a few cons, and the cons were superficial and easily addressed. While it did add conflict to that transition part, that part could still be quick and moved past to get to the real story, and it raised the stakes for the whole story, so that the heroine has a genuine reason to fear failure throughout the book, and she has reason to worry about whether what she does at the end will work.

Basically, I’m yanking away her support system, which always makes things tougher. I guess I’m too nice as an author. I don’t want to hurt my characters. I tend to play it safe as a person, and that usually makes its way into my stories. This is a case of a character not playing it safe, putting everything on the line for something she’s not sure she can even do, but she feels like she has to try.

I’m kind of excited about it now that I’ve overcome my initial resistance.

The funny thing is, it won’t require that much rewriting. There are a couple of scenes that have to go, and I’ll need to write a couple of new ones. Everything else will just require a subtle overlay, and then it makes what happens at the end work better. It’s almost as though I’ve been writing it this way all along and just needed to add the setup.

I love it when the brain works in mysterious ways.