Writer’s Shop Talk: How I Rescued Chapter 23 of My Novel

Late Morning, Friday, January 10, 2025, Miami, Florida

“To write is human, to edit is divine.”― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

For those following my novel-writing journey with Reunion: Coda, yesterday was more productive than Wednesday, although I did lose some productivity.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I made a significant misstep by writing the first scene for Chapter 23 without revisiting some of the earlier chapters. This oversight risked potentially contradicting myself in the storyline. Typically, a quick revisit of two or three chapters is sufficient to refresh my memory and ensure consistency in the plot points I’m developing. Lesson learned: a little preparation can prevent a lot of frustration!

Fortunately, I salvaged most of the scene I wrote on Wednesday. The part that needed fixing was at the end rather than at the beginning or middle. It wasn’t a very long passage, but it contained a time-related mistake that contradicted the schedule for a planned event in March 2000. Therefore, it needed a quick correction.

To save the bulk of the new scene and not come up with a completely different one, I added an epistolary scene using emails to set it up. I used the same technique in the fall of 2023 when I temporarily separated Jim and Maddie by sending one of them on a work-related gig to London. I wrote the scene as a series of emails between my two co-protagonists without the encumbrance of a conventional narrative. So, I ended up with not only one scene but two.

(About epistolary scenes written in email style: There’s something wonderfully intimate about peeking into characters’ inboxes. It’s like discovering that your protagonist prefers sloths over puppies or that your antagonist has a soft spot for knitting. The little quirks of humanity that email exchanges reveal can add layers of depth to your narrative.)

To my fellow writers on this journey: remember that the hardest part of writing a novel is often the ending. It’s the grand finale, the cherry on top, the moment that can make or break the reader’s experience. Whether it’s happy, sad, or somewhere in between, your ending needs to resonate and wrap up the story in a way that feels both satisfying and true to your characters. After all, a well-crafted ending doesn’t just conclude one story—it paves the way for your next.

As for me, I still have at least three chapters to go before I can type “The End” and move on to the other pre-publication tasks for Reunion: Coda. It’s a daunting yet exhilarating phase, but I’m eager to finish strong. Happy writing!