Don't be so judgmental


In my last post, I mentioned two different scenes that I was working on, and my belief that one of them was likely to get cut. Well, things don’t always turn out the way you expect.

I ran the chapter containing these two scenes by my critique group, and they resoundingly liked all of it–some of the most positive reaction to a chapter that I’ve had in a long time. It had been a week or two since I had been editing the scene, and listening to their comments on it I could see that my concerns over the scenes being too similar weren’t really the case.

It’s an interesting situation, and one that needs to be kept in mind when writing–your opinions of a piece when you are in the middle of writing it aren’t always necessarily accurate. Getting some space, stepping back for a while before making too many sweeping judgements is a good idea. If I had gone just on the basis of what I thought, I might well have chopped a section prematurely that does build yet another layer to the world of the book.