TWEAKING IS A BIG HELP

I found these expensive black patent leather shoes marked down to $16 the other day. They have an attractive skinny heel, and they're dressy, and since we go to multitudinous parties and banquets and events in our lives as ministers and mine as a writer, I decided I should buy them. But they had this awful-looking white-pearl-and-black- mesh "star" at the toe. I kept looking at them in the store and decided I could fix them.

At home, I cut the tips off the star, shook the white pearls into the garbage, and painted the remaining attached center pearl with my trusty black Sharpie pen. Wah lah! A pretty pair of black patent leather heels for a steal!

Kind of reminds me what I'm doing with the novel I'm working on now. I'm tweaking, changing, retooling, whatever you want to call it. It's the hardest work in the world. This week, I threw out chapters one and two and made chapter three my first chapter. I've slaved over it, taken eons to craft a single sentence or word. They say Ernest Hemingway would take days sometimes, just to craft the perfect sentence for a passage. Not that I'm comparing myself with Hemingway, :) but it's nice to be in such great company!

I have worked like a Trojan on this novel. I've started it over and over and thrown out (though saved on my computer in a different file) pages and pages. And that's a painful thing, to have slaved over all those pages and then have to throw them out. Ah, such beautiful phrases. Ah, such lyrical words. It's like throwing out something very dear to you. But the passages weren't working. Too much backstory. Information dump. Get to the action.

But her past is the action, my brain argued. Yes, but we need to see the action in her present.

I know that fiction "rule" like I know the back of my hand. But sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.

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Sometimes in marriage, we need to do some tweaking. Attitude adjustments. Different ways of doing or seeing things.

Change is good. It's a forward movement. Staying the same is stagnant.

"Change my heart, oh, God," the song goes. "Make it ever new. Change my heart, oh, God. Let it be like You."

Amen and amen. In my marriage. In my ministry. In my writing.