Ripping a New One, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I mashed two novel scenes into one new one a few weeks ago.

The new scene contained all the necessary information, and it *sort of* had momentum, but it was obviously cobbled together.  There was a lot of redundancy, and it was impossible to read without asking questions like: which character is standing where?  Who is talking to whom?  Who heard what?

I *hated* working on this scene.

1.  I had already polished those old scenes until I loved them-- seeing them all in ruins was difficult.

2.  I had read every word in the old scenes ad nauseum *before* I'd started working on the new scene.  I was growing bored and frustrated.

I polished the new scene as best I could, and ignored it for a few weeks.  Ignored that it didn't make any sense, ignored that it was a thousand words too long (a lot for a spare writer like me), ignored that it was just plain ugly.

I was Frankenstein sending the creature out to die.  

But today I got so desperate not to work on my specs, that I worked on the scene.  I gave up my loyalty to the old stuff.  I went in with as few preconceptions as possible.  Instead of rules, I had goals.

Some goals were plot related (so-and-so has to do such-and-such *now*), and some were hook related (do I *have* to start with dialogue?  How will the reader know what the setting's like?  Am I piling on the layers and info too deeply?)

--I cut everything that wasn't necessary to the *new* scene.  Forget if a line was cool, or it had worked well at some other time, in some other version.  Chopping wittiness is painful, but it's also a relief.  When you have so many babies to care for, you feel lots of love, but you feel lots of responsibility, too.

--I stopped imposing the old scenes' rhythms and structures on the new scene.  The old scenes were pretty much in tatters by today, anyway, which helped me totally break them apart.  But I needed to drop *all* my loyalty to the old stuff, and start over from scratch, so that my new scene would have real momentum, a cohesive feel, and the logistics would be logical. (ie, just because Thing B followed Thing A in the old scene, didn't mean it didn't work better the other way around in the new scene).

In short, I loved both my old scenes.  Both made important story and character points, and both were interesting.  However, neither ultimately worked in my novel's structure.  

Easy, I thought-- I'll mash them together, because two small good things can just mesh into one big good thing, right?  Nope.  In order to find what I really needed from those scenes, I had to give up *all* loyalty to them.  My loyalty had to be with my new scene *entirely*.  That meant letting my new scene dictate its *own* structure, let the dialogue and the character movement play out how it would in this *new* moment, and cutting everything extraneous, regardless of how polished and perfect it seemed.

I had to be confident enough that I could do *better* than I had with my old scenes.  And as of today, I think that confidence is justified :)

UPDATE:

So, despite my resolution to only work on the specs, I've obviously been revising my novel some more. 

I don't think I can just work on one project at a time!  But at least if I limit myself to two, I'll either work on one or the other and won't spread myself too thin.