Okay, maybe not brutal, but definitely honest.

I’ve been working on my current WIP for quite a while now. I had it about half done with a fair bit in current works. I know the ending, more or less. But I really, really wanted some solid feedback. I knew there were some issues but I wasn’t sure exactly what they were, and until you know what the problem is, well, you can’t fix it, now can you?

I love my friends, but I wasn’t getting the kind of feedback I needed. It’s nice to hear “this is good!” but that doesn’t get you very far in fixing stuff. So I went to one of the writer boards on FB and found someone willing to work with me. And that was good!

Comments came in. Some good, some less so. Of those I think some had to do with personal style and taste; I logged those for further consideration and went on to the next comment.

And this paid off big time.  SOLID critique, at last! Some pointed at something I was aware of, and I will address that when I figure out how… But that issue pointed at something else we hadn’t gotten to yet – and here’s where I struck gold with my beta reader!

One piece of advice I see in writer advice is “Kill Your Darlings.” What that means for you non-writerly types is that no matter how good a scene is in the writer’s mind, no matter how perfectly you’ve crafted the words, no matter how fond you are of it – if it ain’t working, it’s gotta go.

I have a real darling right in the midpoint of the story, and it’s gotta go.

Really good fight between my Main Character and his nemesis. Good action. Snarky, pointed, nasty dialogue on my baddie’s part. A good death scene and a dying curse, leading to a real existential crisis in my Main Character! Angst! Woe! Friendly interventions!

Um, do you see the problem here?

Here it is: You can’t kill off your main villain in the middle of the book. And the backup villains, the leaders of a foreign government, are taken out by someone other than my Main Character in what amounts to a Deus Ex Machina.

GINORMOUS no-no.

Now, I *did* know these were problems, but sometimes  ya gotta write something to get it out of your head so you can go on to write something else, and that’s what these were. That’s how they wrote themselves.

So, my darlings, you’ve got to go.

Piece of writerly advice: never, Ever, NEVER delete scenes entirely and erase them from your computer! Instead, you cut them out and paste them into a new document and save them. That was very likely some of your best writing, that’s why it was your Darling! Thing is, you may not be able to use it in a later scene, or even in the same work. But you MAY be able to recycle pieces/parts later, or somewhere else.  Or use it as inspiration for something else. Creativity, like energy, is not wasted.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’m taking a break to do some of what I call “writing-adjacent” work. That’s everything that has to do with writing that doesn’t actually involve, you know, the actual “writing” of a story. Research, character studies, stuff like that. In my case, I’m going back to basics. REALLY basics – story structure, outlining, that sort of thing. Reading articles from sources I know and trust.

One of my friends years ago told me that I was “giving my life away to figuring it out.” But sometimes a writer’s gotta do what a writer’s gotta do, and so I’m a-gonna do it.

And this book will be all the better for it.