While I'm talking about rewriting, I want to share an insight I had while reading Cold Fire by Dean Koontz. The novel has two lead characters. The hero is a man who gets psychic premonitions of crimes, accidents, and other such tragedies; when he gets such a premonition, he rushes to the site of the disaster and tries to save as many people as he can. The heroine is a reporter who sees the man yank a child from the path of an oncoming car; she wants to interview him as a "Good Samaritan" but he refuses. Later, she sees his picture in connection with a woman he just rescued from a biker gang. The reporter tries to track the man down and eventually follows him onto an airplane that he has foreseen will crash on takeoff. She just catches up with him when all hell breaks loose and the two of them work together to help as many people as possible survive the crash.
The crash is a lovely dramatic scene, and shows us a lot about the strength and courage of the two leads...but when I'd finished reading the scene, I had a great epiphany: it didn't have to be an air crash. Koontz could have chosen any other kind of disaster—a ferry sinking, a terrorist bombing, an earthquake, a tornado—and it wouldn't have made any meaningful difference to the book. In fact, the only plot requirement was to get the hero and heroine together. They could have met in a coffee shop and the plot would proceed in exactly the same way.
Why is this an important insight? Because it showed
me that nothing is cast in stone. Koontz did a good job
of writing the air crash—it was tense and memorable.
But if, for some reason, he wrote a draft of the air crash
and decided he didn't like it, he could have replaced the
whole scene with something else and it wouldn't have
made a difference to the rest of the book.
| This is a lesson every writer has to learn: your first version isn't the only possibility. |
Stories are fictions you invent. If you decide a particular scene doesn't work, you can invent something different that serves the same purpose. Sure, you may have to make little adjustments in the rest of the piece—you might have to change a line in some later chapter from, "Remember that time in the air crash," to, "Remember that time in the earthquake"—but generally speaking, stories and novels have few elements that are so essential they can't be changed.
Your first version isn't the only possibility.
Almost anything can be replaced if it's not working.
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Copyright © 2001, James Alan Gardner