So you thought that a writer just sat down and wrote a book from start to finish, and it’s done?

Not quite. There are some days when everything you write is wrong. More often, it’s only a small part of what you write. Still, it’s painful.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Picking up where my last blog left off, once my proposal is approved, I start to write. In the case of The Secret Between Us, this meant writing the accident scene that opens the book. I was fun. I mean, it was horrible. But I knew what I had to write, which isn’t always the case. So I wasn’t staring at a blank screen wondering what came next.

Outtake Issue #1: Names. I picked Deborah as the name of my main character, and used it through Chapter 1, at which point I worried that it was too long. So, using my find-and-replace feature, I changed it to Sarah, a name I’ve always loved for its gentleness. That lasted through Chapter 2, when I decided that Sarah was too gentle for my family doctor. Not only that, but I had named her father Matthew, which fit him well – but a good friend of mine has children named Sarah and Matt. Since I have a weird aversion to naming characters after people I know, the pairing hit too close to home. So I changed every Sarah in Chapters 1 and 2 to Lisa and wore that name through Chapter 3, but just kept stumbling over it. I still loved the sound of Deborah, which felt properly strong and good. So I tried a shorter spelling – Debra. One more chapter of that, and I went back through now 80+ pages, reverting to the original Deborah. It may be long, but it’s perfect for my book.

I also agonized over the names of the accident victim and his brother. One of the original names felt too evil, the next too cutesy. And then there was the brother pairing -- I mean, you don't want Mack and Jack, or Tom and Dick. I called these brothers half a dozen names before finally settling on Calvin and Tom. What would I do without find-and-replace?

Outtake Issue 2? Point of view. My rule of thumb is that a particular scene should be written from the POV of the person with the greatest emotional stake. I knew that Deborah Monroe was my main voice in The Secret Between Us, and I knew that I also had to express the POV of her daughter, Grace. Their emotions were going to be the core of the book. As I got into the writing, though, I also felt that Deborah’s young son Dylan had a huge emotional stake and should speak. Same with Tom, the victim’s brother, who was heavily, emotionally involved. Same with the Chief of Police, who supervised the accident investigation that forms the backbone of the plot.

Well, 100 pages later, my editor suggested that the book would be stronger and more focused if written from two POVs only – those of Deborah and Grace. That meant my going back and rewriting scenes I had originally written in the three other voices. In most cases, such as Dylan and his love of the music of his namesake, Bob Dylan, I was able to express his feelings from either his mom’s POV or his sister’s. In some of the instances with Tom and the cop, I left material on the cutting room floor. So you’ll never learn about Tom’s first encounter with the sister-in-law he hadn’t known about. Does it matter for the plot? Absolutely not. My editor was right. Two POVs. That’s it.

Outtake Issue 3: Intrigue. You have to understand how tough it is sometimes trying to decide what comes next in a character-driven book. In a pinch, the default is intrigue. Toss in a mysterious character. Add the FBI. Let the reader worry about the Feds going after the protagonist whom we have already come to love. Well, I did have my mysterious character in the accident victim, Cal McKenna, whom Deborah’s car had hit. But somewhere around Chapter 5 or 6, I sent two government agents to Deborah’s house and had them grill her about the accident. I was thinking that Cal might be a secret agent, that the FBI was already worried that he’d been compromised and were now wondering if he had been deliberately hit.

My editor nixed that one real fast. "No intrigue," she said. "That isn't your niche." So a fabulous scene, three days in the writing, was deleted with the click of a mouse. "Your books don’t need intrigue," she insisted. And looking back at the finished product, I see that she's right.

Outtake Issue 4: SEX. Those of you who have followed my career know that I write good sex. But being able to write it is different from it being necessary to the plot. The more emotional and issue-driven my plots have become, the less it fits. So I was careful with the one sex scene that I wrote into The Secret Between Us. The way the words came together, I didn’t have to describe every little touch or moan, yet we felt the passion.

“Don’t do it, Barbara,” my editor said. “It’s a distraction.”

Out came the sex, which I had spent forever writing and had absolutely loved. But here, too, she was right. What I wrote in its place is far better.

And that’s the bottom line regarding outtakes. As painful as it is to cut scenes that you’ve sweated over, if they strengthen the finished book, they’re worth it.

BTW, if you’re wondering which characters may or may not have had sex in The Secret Between Us, you’ll have to read the book. My lips are sealed.

Coming up next? The angst of plotting.