We give our characters a rough time. They’d probably all feel like taking a swing at us, were we to somehow meet. Some of them inspire no sympathy, while for others we do spare a regretful thought now and then for what we’ve put them through.

At the moment, we’re feeling a little sorry for Neil. He’s a secondary character (and it feels unkind just pointing that out — “thanks, now you’re marginalizing me, too?”) in the music novel. Not quite 10% of it is from his point of view. He’s probably the nicest person in the cast, at least top three. He’s a sweetheart. And we’re cruel to him.

The latest ignominy to be visited on Neil is that we cut one of his scenes. Not just any scene: this was his Emmy Moment, a cathartic, self-revelatory monologue. It’s tranquil, but not boring. Peaceful. Stuff that we kept includes some truly brutal events, things Neil might have voted to cut instead.

Sorry, Neil.

In a previous draft of the book there was substantially less Neil POV, as in one scene. Rune Skelley doesn’t have a lot of rules (not strict ones, anyway) but we really do try to avoid giving anybody exactly one POV scene. In this case, it was a really good scene that performed important functions in the story, and it worked because of Neil’s POV specifically. Our solution was to find at least one other beat that could be shown from Neil. We knew we were already bending our “rule,” so we took special care not to create a pointless scene just as an excuse for the POV. That’s how he got his chance to grow as a human being right before your eyes.

swish pan!

Now we’ve made huge revisions (resulting in a borderline-huge manuscript!) and, in this draft, Neil gets point of view several times. That cathartic moment of discovery we set up for him is still a lovely scene, but, well, there’s pacing to consider… A good writing partner offers suggestions for what to cut as well as what to add. Suggesting cuts is easy when the material in question is shoddy, but that wasn’t the case here. Sometimes it has to come out even though there’s nothing wrong with it. Those are the difficult choices.

It’s not that we suddenly decided Neil was slowing things down, rather the story beats had shifted due to all the restructuring. We no longer wanted the stillness of Neil’s big scene in that particular spot. So, Neil loses out in pursuit of the greater good for the book overall. The events still take place, just not on the page. (See, Neil? It’s not so terrible.)

We also cut a short scene from one of the other secondary POVs, but we have no sympathy for Darren.