Digging to the truth
So I'm still in a rewrite of Crashpoint Cascade. And I'm plowing through this scene, feeling itchy because it's not right. It's not immediate enough, it's like a rough draft that I hadn't noticed is a rough draft.
It's a scene around a picnic table, with a number of characters, some of them minor. One of them is trying to convince the rest to stick with him through a political crisis. So a few characters just pop up out of nowhere who were at the table the whole time but I just had not focused on them. And they start talking, pulling the scene in other directions.
Before I know it, the scene is going off the rails. I've got some new characters raising issues that don't fit, I don't know why they're saying things, where they're going with various positions and statements. Chaos. but some of it is interesting, and a little voice says not to throw those tidbits away.
And then I move a paragraph that had made the whole narrative disjunctive. And pieces start to fall into place. Motives appear, things start to make sense. I realize that the true scene was there all along, lurking somewhere in my subconcious. It needed to be pried out slowly and carefully. There's a process to make this happen. I must keep doing it and not rushing to get so many pages done per day.