http://blog.laurellkhamilton.org/index.php/site/comments/tempted_api1/
Tempted
One of the things I like best about fiction is being able to rewrite. It allows you to fix all your mistakes with a clear-eyed 20/20 vision that real life rarely gives you. But just because you can fix the “mistakes” does that mean you should? We had deaths of characters early in “Bullet”. I cried, I got depressed, I put it out on the Internet, and let all that emotion spread. Not sure if I’ll do that again, by the by, but once I did it there was no taking it back. So since I have already shared, I’ll share this moment, too.
I am in the very end game of this book. I feel that we need some extra scenes earlier to set up the end. That’s fine, it happens. I’m rereading the book here and there searching for where to tease the cloth of the book apart enough to insert that new thread. I come to the scene I knew I’d need from the moment things went pear-shaped for the characters. I know I need one short chapter here. But it occurred to me that if I change things just a little, then we can save the deaths, the injuries, and so much, but even as I write this I know I can’t. I know the fight must stand as it is. Maybe I can save the last bit, the very last part, and make it not so depressingly final, but I’m left wondering why I’m so tempted to bring the dead back to life, and make the foolish smarter so that everyone can live?
Am I doing it for my characters and this book? Or am I doing it because I went to a funeral this week,a nd watched people I love grieve? If I had not seen another family member in a coffin this week would I be so tempted to save the lives of my fictional friends?
I don’t know. In a way a writer can never know what part of their real life impacts the writing the most. You can make guesses, and sometimes it becomes painfully clear. I’ve had that moment of clarity so bright and sharp that it is squirmingly painful. That therapy moment when you realize what issue you’re working on paper and why your character did that, and what dark bit of your own psyche needed it done. I’m more at peace with those moments than I was years ago, but still I usually know my motives after a book is written. I don’t remember questioning my motives before a book is finished before, not like this. So, I ask myself, if the funeral hadn’t happened this week, just Thursday, would I be this tempted to rewrite the book and bring the dead back to life?
I still don’t know. I do know that one of the reasons so few people that are emotionally important to my main characters is a direct result of my own early losses. I have had enough real death and loss in my life that I love the fact that in fiction I can save people. It still isn’t done consciously though, it’s just the way my muse and I roll. It works for her and me. If I change this scene and save people it will be a conscious decision to save the day. If I do it you, the readers, may never know where the scene was and what I changed, or who didn’t die. But I’m not sure that my own emotional wounds are enough reason to save my imaginary friends after I have already gone through the grief. We saved one of them early in the book and that was the very one that caused the extra carnage later, so in trying to prevent death I made it worse, made it a higher body count. Is that my lesson? That sometimes in trying to save one life, you risk more later? Or is the lesson, that I’m human and I’m allowed to have all these emotions. I’m allowed to be bothered by real life grief and I’m allowed to find ways to comfort myself. That would be true.
I’m just not certain where my own emotion leaves off and my responsibility to my imaginary friends comes into play. I’m not even certain which master saving the lives would serve; me, or my world? I will read the scene after lunch and that will decide me. If it reads well, I will let it stand, if it reads badly, then I may rewrite it. I have never been so conflicted about my own writing before. There is a part of me that wants it to read badly so I can have the excuse to rewrite it. Maybe that’s why God chooses to limit himself/their-selves in our world, because if They did not they would be rewriting around our own free will so often that time would stop and history be only theory. Free will is a wonderful gift, but in real life as in the imaginary one it can also screw a whole lot of things up.
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