The Magic in the Drawer

It’s true, the oft repeated wisdom that sometimes you just have to put the darn thing away for a while. I was discussing with a writer friend of mine the other day how solutions seem to magically ferment while the manuscript is stuck away in a drawer. Somehow, there’s a weird chemical reaction that occurs, linking The Untouchable Drawer to the author’s brain. It brews up answers to puzzling dilemmas and makes glaring errors we couldn’t see for being too close to the work, visible.

Last spring, I started my western/whatever-it-is novel with a character that I really enjoyed: Jimmy Donovan. A charming but irresponsible rogue, he was going to be one of the primary POV characters in the story and in fact, started the story off and running. Before too long, I was actively looking for something for him to do in order to justify his presence in the story, because I liked him. A lot.

Nada is what I kept coming up with. Well, I’ll just write around him and his “stuff” for a while, as long as I’m writing in random scenes anyway, I said. So I did.

Over the winter, I put my MS in the drawer for reasons that had more to do with pouting than authorial wisdom, but there was this surprising benefit: When I took it out again and looked it over, I – just like that [envision fingers snapping here] – decided to get rid of Jimmy Donovan. Piece of cake.

The emotional distance I gained from sticking him in the drawer for months allowed me to see the “obvious” solution: Dispose of a character who wasn’t adding anything of substance to the story.

Later still, I decided that, rather than get rid of him entirely, I would just reduce him to a reference, where Kit receives a Dear John from him at the outset of the story. He becomes then, just one more piece of her terrible, rotten, hideously bad day.

Now, if I choose to write the second and third books of the series I have in mind (assuming I WILL one day finish this first one!), he will appear in one of them. I still like the guy, after all. He’s got possibilities. He’s just not necessary to the current story, so out he goes.

I have a hunch that something better is going to come of Jimmy Donovan, once he’s had the chance to ferment in that drawer for another year or so. ;)