When Things Can Still Happen That Aren’t Actually Happening

I know that writers tend not to talk about their books so as to not give any spoilers away, but I had a scene in my current WIP I was working on where there was this character who was going to commit suicide and everything about the scene just felt entirely wrong. It made it unbelievably difficult to write because it just didn’t feel like the right choice for that character. There were a couple other scenes leading up to that moment when she was going to drink a tea made of poison, but I chose to keep those other scenes – Why? Because they didn’t actually kill her, and they create just the right amount of tension for that character to be experiencing. In a poetic sense, she may have died a little on the inside, or even changed, but she’s still around to play another part in the story.

Generally, when things can still happen that aren’t actually, this is known better as alluding or implying something, which is done all the time in horror movies where they set the precedent for something scary to happen and you know that it’s going to, but they cut away from the scene before it can. All it takes is belief by the audience, or the total suspension thereof.

When I deleted those words, it was like cutting away from the scene, but she survived – so things do not always have the expected outcome. Sometimes hitting the backspace takes us down a more interesting, better fitting path.