Despite feeling sicker than I have in a long time, and it being the two hottest days of the year here, so far, I got a decent amount of writing done over the weekend. Much of it at odd hours, because I napped a lot. I would be awake for a few hours, then sleep of a few. It became a little confusing.

Months ago, I wrote the opening paragraph for a scene which I expected to use a few chapters later in the novel than I was, at that time. I’ve had this very strong image in my head for all that time of one of my protagonists sitting at a table in a tavern he used to hang out at during his mispent youth (note: the character is a professional thief of some notoriety-so it could be argued he’s in his misspent adulthood and approaching his misspent middle age) and slowly coming to the realization that much more has changed than meets the eye.

I hadn’t written more than the one paragraph because I knew some of the intervening scenes would determine what information I needed him to obtain during this scene.

So I wrote the scene yesterday. It was funny and closely matched my original vision. There was a big problem: by the time I’d finished, the character hadn’t learned anything important to the actual plot. Nor could the scene be said to reveal anything new and significant about the character.

I read it through again, and I had absolutely no idea what the character logically should do next to move the plot along.

Or rather, I had ideas for what he should do next, but this scene didn’t point to any of them. It made sense that he would go to this place to try to find something he needed. And it made sense, based on other events, that he’d experience some bewilderment that this former hub of underworld activity was now a sad used-to-be. But it wasn’t worth making the reader go through that for a few chuckles. Not when there are kidnapped children to rescue, a princess in peril, a possible war simmering, et cetera.

It would be like spending a thousand words describing the public restroom your hero has to visit in between action scenes. Yeah, everyone has to go sometime, but usually it isn’t interesting.

For a few seconds I thought about my usual rule: don’t go back to revise a scene until I’ve written the next one. But if there’s a time to break your own rule, this was it.

I didn’t delete the scene. I just cut it and pasted it into the Research section of my Scrivener project.

Then I re-wrote the scene. I kept a few lines. And the humorous discovery that things have changed in ways he hadn’t expect is still there, but it’s much less the focus of the scene. Once I stopped trying to think of more clever ways to surprise the character that something has changed, the scene flowed forward, and led him to his next step.

Sometimes you have to write a bad scene before you can write it right.