Editing drama or a God complex?

You've poured your heart and soul onto the page. You've agonized over word choices. You've carefully crafted descriptions and dialogue. Now comes the dreaded red pen and that nasty delete button.

No matter how hard we try to craft the perfect mix of characters, storyline, dialogue and description, there will be portions of our newly finished work in progress that has to go. Sure taking out a word here or there is easy. Fine tuning a sentence or changing what you describe in a particular scene is no problem.

Then you come to a point when you realize you have to make the big changes. Deleting chunks of your work and even removing entire characters. It's like severing a limb when you have to lose one of those characters. They are our friends. They have been our companions through the wee hours of the night as we've sat huddled over our keyboards pouring our passion onto the page, but there comes a time when you have to say goodbye.

The first time I had to face the fact that I needed to remove a character I was heartbroken. Don't get me wrong, I liked the story much better without the character, but I didn't want to say goodbye to him. I felt like I was killing a friend. It was like a betrayal.

You never really understand how entangled a character is in a story until you have to cut one out. Dialogue, scenes and sometimes whole plot lines have to be removed. When I eliminated my first character, I had to rewrite the whole second half of the book. I felt so bad each time a reference had to be removed.

I do have to admit there are some characters that just beg to be eliminated. I've cringed when writing sometimes thinking about how much I want to get rid of a particular character, but instead I continue the plot. It gets easier the more characters you cut. Sometimes, it's better to delete a character than kill one. I mean sure you can relieve some stress by writing a death scene, but erase them from existence -- talk about power! I have to watch that head rush. I think I might develop a God complex from it all.

Character revolts!

I'm used to the characters in my story taking over and often changing where I planned the story to go. It is common for me to battle with the voices in my head over who is really controlling the story. Therefore, you wouldn't think I'd be shocked by the revolt my characters led to start the new year.

I sat down to write my first words on my book for 2012 with the idea that I was starting the process off on the "write" foot. I had been neglecting my writing a bit too much, and my characters proved it as the first words typed out on the page became a battle of epic proportion. I was in the middle of one chapter and those characters refused to behave. Dialogue was a mess, friends wanted to be enemies, no one wanted to follow the plot line and some just refused to even speak up or participate at all.

The characters not involved in the chapter then decided they wanted some attention. My characters seem to have super egos, not mentioned in two chapters and suddenly they have to get my attention. Wrenching my story line into their direction, those characters at least were behaving normally, even though they were getting ahead of themselves.

So, I took matters into my own hands...I left the pages and went to work on the book cover instead. I'll teach those crazy characters to try and hijack my story -- or is it their story? Maybe I'm just going crazy -- or was I already crazy?

Today is another day. I'm heading in for battle armed with my delete button for anyone that gets a bit too rowdy. If this is any indication, 2012 is going to be a very wild ride. I'm buckling in for the duration!