Fixing Things

The harshest thing anyone has ever said about one of my books/stories/ideas was that a character that I love very dearly was a pedophile. 

It was a co-worker, who also happens to enjoy writing.  I had finished the original manuscript of Without Light and found the courage to let her have the pdf of the first half.  What was I thinking?  So MUCH will change…and the result was brutal.  A pedophile.  She’d become uncomfortable reading the story because of that fact. 

After talking to her I remember being in the ladies’ room at my office, staring in the mirror, just about in tears.  I felt sick.  I felt as if I had betrayed that character by writing him so poorly; clearly this was my fault, because it wasn’t HIS fault.  HE is a good man and would be horrified to be considered a pedophile.  I felt like scrapping the entire project, never publishing it, because the characters always become very real to me.  I couldn’t bear to think of anyone seeing him that way.

This was my most blatant experience with ‘putting the story on paper.’  It’s in my head.  I know what he’s really like, but I hadn’t managed to get that sense down on the page.  In the end, I was determined to fix the story so that people could see who he really was.   I understand now why she thought of him that way, and what I can do to change that view.

I’ve done a lot of things I consider stupid in the writing of this book, things that make me look back and wonder if I had all my crayons in the box at the time.  That’s true of most writers, I think.  The point is- that doesn’t kill a story.  You can fix it, save it, make it more reasonable, and still keep the feeling you want.  If something feels strange to you, it probably is strange!  But people are strange, and we don’t shove them in a drawer and forget about them.  I don’t want that to happen to my characters, either.