RIP Another Beloved Character

For about two months now, I’ve been avoiding my story. Yup. I finally got so sick of revising it and not being done that I set it aside.

And then, this feeling began to grow on me. “You know why this isn’t working,” the feeling said. “You know what you have to do.” It slowly became clearer, this thought I’ve pondered and then pushed away. Yet another character has to go.

I’d wondered about Jaime. He’d begun to feel superfluous. His relationship with my POV 2 was too close to POV 2’s relationship with POV 1. But! I always said to myself. “But that scene at the end is so crucial to POV 2’s development!” What I was probably actually saying was, “But that scene at the end is SO BEAUTIFUL!” And then, I’d say to myself, “But Jaime is one of the oldest characters, even though he’s always been a side character. He’s been in the story longer than POV 2!” Which is always a wonderful reason to keep a character when EVERYTHING else tells you to cut him. :-\

And so, today, as I recovered on the couch after being sick, I opened up my story file. I did a name search for Jaime. And then I cut him.

And you know what? There are about 2 scenes that actually require any major revision. For most of them, I just cut a couple of paragraphs, and you’d never even know they were missing.

So, yeah, probably should have cut Jaime a long time ago . . . .

Sorry, pup.