Monday, July 16, 2007

Dumped the House. Sob.

Not Daniel's house. A fictional house, in Time and the Soldier.

This house has been there since the earliest outline for the novel, as I remember. It was a nifty and niftily mysterious house. I really liked it.

But it just didn't fit into the plot. In fact, keeping it would have required all sorts of extraneous stuff added to the story, for no other purpose than to justify keeping the house. So tonight I gritted my teeth and girded my loins and bit the bullet and wrote the house out of existence. Oh, the iron demands of aaahhht! Sob!

On the bright side, some stuff gets blowed up real good.

5 comments:

alternatefish said...

I think I'm going to have to do this to an extraneous character soon. I feel like I'm killing my baby.

David said...

Yes, that can really hurt.

It's hard enough to kill your darlings, which (if I'm remembering correctly) refers to those prose passages that seem to transcendentally wonderful but really aren't, or at least are extraneous. But a character that you created and know so well -- it's almost like murder. And there can be a real feeling of loss for a while afterward.

Perhaps you can use him/her in something else.

Travis Erwin said...

Sometimes destruction can be fun.

Have a bad day at work -- go home and kill off that annoying character.

alternatefish said...

hey! my characters are not annoying, thank you! :P

Travis Erwin said...

Come on fish. They can't all be likable. One of them has to remind you of an avid Harry Potter fan. Right? :)