I’m editing, that delicate process of Jenga with words, this is the tweezer moment plus one big bit of heavy lifting. A whole chapter in which I cheated has to be un-cheated and done properly. All writers know how hard it is to keep momentum while moving through time. I want to say and then it was April and this happened and fill in those missing months with the past perfect tense which produces neither perfection nor tension. The live action is in the live action, being there; she sat down not she had sat. But it’s so nerve-wracking, so hard to be present for every beat of the story, every pulse that those characters live through. I want to brush it over, get out the other side and yet of course, if I do, as I did, the reader misses the action too. The live pulsing beat of tension is lost. It’s all in yawning retrospect. It will not do. So having gone through the easier little bits, a tweak here, a nudge there, I begin the dismantling of this end of act two from its cheating hindsight look back and rebuild it firmly in the now, the now of the novel, the next day. Did I say it was nerve-wracking? Also that terrible cut and paste when sections are put aside to be inserted somewhere else, that new file opened CHAPTER 6 INSERTS in which paragraphs are painstakingly lifted like rescued horses, their legs dangling, winched into the air and stabled temporarily in another yard while their stable is redesigned. I am flying the helicopter and controlling the winch and wielding the axe and using the chain saw and holding the plans and taking the pencil from behind my ear and measuring the doors and pacing the walls and waving from the ground and leading the horses to their makeshift corral where they will not stay for long. I am doing all these things. And I will put it all back together. And it will be better.
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You WILL I Miss you
Resonates with exactly what I’m doing today. All power to you.