When a scene writes itself…

So, after a few weeks of either me or one of my kids being sick, I think I’m finally going to finish the final edit.  Hooray. 

Among all the other things I’ve realized during this edit, I’d like to add one more.  One of my beta readers had made a suggestion about a particular scene.  She wanted part of it to be longer.  At first I wasn’t sure, but I think that might have been because I didn’t have a good idea of how to do what she suggested.  After thinking about it for a while, I finally had a great idea.

I started writing and it was going great.  I was feeling the characters.  I even thought of one thing to include that I think adds a little more emotion.  Strangely enough, however, hardly any of what I ended up writing was exactly how I’d planned it.  I thought things would go one direction and while the basic idea of the scene didn’t change, the direction it took to get there was completely different.  And better.

I guess the lesson is that sometimes writing just writes itself.  Now that does have a caveat:  You do have to have a general idea of where you’re headed.  But sometimes, especially after you’ve really gotten to know your characters, they have a way of telling you what they want to do instead of the other way around.