I’m rereading the chapters of Story Engineering about how to write scenes, and the gap between how I have written my scenes so far and how this book makes it clear that I should be writing them is disheartening. In particular, at the moment, I’m still in the middle of this massive, meandering scene in the castle ruins that started with looking for evidence of what caused the blast, then had my hero and best friend running, and now has them “picking up” the jester character to flee all together. It’s all over the place, meandering and unclear and I think it’s easily one of the worst so far.
I’m tempted to go back and do the whole thing over again, but I know that’s not the way forward. I will have to try to fix this – and my other scenes – on the rewrite. For now, I need to bring this mess to a close, get into the next scene, and just keep practicing writing better scenes as I continue with the story. That’s going to be the best way to practice.