This rewrite is really becoming an eye-opener.

While it would be too easy to stick with most of what I had before and just make some minor changes, there’s a line in the notes I got over the summer that really stuck in my head: your hero has to be challenged more.  The way the story plays out now doesn’t do that.

Something had to be done.

Now I look at every scene with the intent of changing it to not only make the hero the one moving things forward, but also to make sure he can’t just cruise through it.

This includes a key scene where the hero basically complicates things out of clumsiness, which was also commented on in the aforementioned notes. That definitely had to change.

I don’t remember which famous writer said it, but basically, if you get stuck, introduce a gun, or have somebody shoot a gun. Something like that.

And my hero has a gun.

See where this is going?

Without even realizing it, I had my character doing something I never thought he would. Or could. Now the dynamic of the scene has drastically changed, while keeping the purpose the same.

I’d heard about this before, but never actually experienced it myself.

They say your characters can really surprise you at times, and this was a prime example of that. Kind of makes me wonder what else both of us are capable of as the story advances.

Feels like things are about to get really interesting.