No Pain, No Gain

That’s what They say anyway. Whoever They is…

But this came up in my writing group, or rather, it has been a constant topic of conversation on and off. Y’see, one of my CPs found out a very inconvenient truth about her heroine. One she didn’t want to write. Or face.

(Side note, I told my mom this story and she laaauuughed. She thinks writers are crazy, cuz if we make the people, how can they surprise us? Or have things in their past we don’t want them to have? Well, I have no time to explain that perfectly logical bit of information to her. No. Time. But it’s logical. And we’re not crazy)

Anyway, my CP decided to embrace this element of her MS, even though it’s taken her a whole direction, and even though it’s like shoving toothpicks under her fingernails to write.

Sometimes I find that when I’ve gone the wrong direction on a MS it’s because I’m denying the essential truth of it. Sounds weird, yes, I know, but hey, bear with me and my crazy writer self for a moment. Just a moment. Take my hand, go on the magical journey. O_O

Really, I do that. Sometimes I miss the whole point of my MS trying to gloss over something that I half-realized at the beginning, but that I didn’t want to deal with.

The Inherited Bride, which I wrote *coughthreetimescough* was like that. I had the basics down from draft one. Forbidden love, yada yada. He wants her, but he can’t have her. However, in the initial drafts…he did just give in. And again, and again and again he gave in. Because it was easier. It was easier than having him fight it. Easier than facing the fact that, with his character, there would be no easy fix. Because for him, having feelings for his brother’s intended bride is a violation of all he believes in.

I had to understand that. To realize I had given my hero a core of unbreakable beliefs that would have to be broken if he was going to pursue the heroine. Yeah, yay me. And I cried writing those scenes. Those scenes where I had to break that strong man. (You all know I like it too, but honestly, at the time it’s always death!)

In the end though, the payoff was much richer. It took pain to get there, but it was better.

I had the same thing happen a few MSs later with a heroine. In my mind, I wanted to make her innocent of this pretty terrible thing she’d been accused of. And I trucked along for 100 pages covering my ears, humming, and pretending she was just the victim. But I was lying to myself. She wasn’t the victim. She wasn’t innocent.

That was another case of having to take on something tougher than I’d anticipated. But those MSs, those ones that shocked me like that, that made me deal with hard issues, or dig deeper into characters, are the ones that have truly grown me as a writer.

I’m dealing with Beast Sheikh right now, and he is…well, he’s a beast. I think there are some hard truths left to learn about him too. That’s why No Pain, No Gain has to be my motto for the next few weeks while I work on uncovering his secrets.

You should do the same! Take on the hard stuff. One of the best pieces of advice from my editor was that she would always have me take on the hard ones and do revisions, rather than just skim by with easy.