i  just wrote a scene that took on a life of its own, in a rather frightening way. It wasn’t supposed to be a happy scene; it features my heroine and a rather unsavory character who we meet in the first chapter of the book. In my brief sketch of the chapter, I’d labeled the scene “J. confronts T.”
The scene was supposed to be a little frightening. But it turned incredibly squicky, and it almost horrified me to write it. This is not at all the kind of thing I want to think about. I kept thinking that I shouldn’t go down that path–but the fact of the matter is, I think I do need to go there. I can’t pull my punches on this one, and if I just settled for a mere threat of physical violence here, I don’t think I’d be properly escalating the tension.
Frustratingly, the scene’s not very good yet, because it is so squicky that I’m shying away from writing it well. I have to fight myself not to dial down the language; it’s probably the hardest three pages I have had to write all book. This is not the kind of scene I signed up to write when I said I wanted to be a romance author. And yet it is exactly the scene that’s demanded here. When I made a decision to raise the stakes and punch up my heroine’s conflict, I think I knew in the back of my mind that this is what I was doing to myself. And to her. This is so far outside of my comfort zone.
Without further ado, one sentence from the hardest scene I’ve ever written:

“Jacob,” Thalia said quietly, “I am your sister, not your wife.”

So what about you? How far outside your comfort zone have you had to push yourself? And how do you make yourself get there?

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