These Are Meaningless Words In The Subject Line

I've been having a hard time reigning in my nineteenth chapter.  My hero is finally dealing with the thread of conflict I wrote into the first chapter.  It's weird to think that I wrote those original words a full year ago.  It's exciting, but also scary.  Anyway, I discovered just now what the problem was.  I'd been trying not to admit that I was shoving two chapters together and that the information he gathers in chapter nineteen is really the climax.  I really wanted to have him kill some orcs in that chapter and I tried to squish together what should've been squished.

Of course, I'd been trying to rescue a particular scene that I'd dreamed up when I first put the idea together in my head.  I like the cliffhanger chapter endings and I thought this one was pretty good, but now, because of length, it has to happen in the middle of the next chapter.  Which is okay.  I guess.  *folding arms and pouting*

In her book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott references a writer's practice of "killing your babies" (or something like that, I can't look it up right now because I loaned out my copy of the book) It sounds gruesome, I know, and in a way it is pretty gruesome.  Your absolute favorite scenes, often the ones that convince you a novel is worth writing, are the scenes your try to cling to the most as you proceed to chop through your outline.  Much like a film director, you want to cut scenes that don't show the story as well as they could or maybe take your story in the wrong direction.  At some point you must slay this scene that you love without mercy.  If you restructure your book around it, it will inevitably harm your work as a whole.  It must die.  This doesn't make it any less painful, of course.

The point is this: for some crazy reason I thought I was immune to this.  I thought that I could keep this scene where I wanted it (as a cliffhanger) and people would read it and gasp.  Just not the case any more.  I had to let it go.  Today I cut off chapter nineteen where it needed to end and moved the other stuff to the next chapter where it will receive a stern talking to and I will expect it to think about what it's done.