Yesterday, I read the short three page scene currently up for revision. It was bad. Like so much of this ms. it flopped like a gasping fish on the page. What was supposed to be a tender kissing scene just wasn’t.
What to do? Well, I didn’t have a clue. So I sent out an S.O.S. and Heidi replied with some good advice. She said that first I should avoid thinking of it as a kissing scene. Which was fine because in my mind it had already turned into yet another gasping fish. Per Heidi’s advice, I checked for conflict. There wasn’t any that I could see.
Instead of begging for more advice, I decided to do the writerly thing and just cut the scene to the bone. Leave in only the parts I could still stand. That left three sentences. And somewhere in those three sentences, just as Heidi had promised, was a glimmer of what might actually be a possible conflict. Hey!
So, I rewrote the scene from scratch and it was much better. Except in this version there is no actual kissing. I stop it right before the kiss. I wonder if that’s cheating.
My dilemma today is do I leave the scene as it is, or do I put the kiss in?
PRO kiss: I want my main character to develop a relationship with the guy. I want them to be close, to really like each other. How do I show this? Well, lots of ways, but in my experience when two unattached people are attracted to each other, eventually they kiss. It seals the deal.
CON kiss: Describing a kiss sounds like stereo instructions unless there’s something else there. If there’s something else there, it’s not really about the kiss anymore. So why put it in? Make it plain that this is what they’d like to do, that this is in fact what they probably do off the page, but just don’t describe it. Except. That seems like cheating.
Solution: Write the scene both ways. See which works better. Meaning, I need to add the kiss. Instead of doing it the stereo instruction way “His mouth met hers, blah, blah, blah…” I need to come up with a way to describe the kiss without describing it. Maybe by saying how it makes her feel. Except resorting to analogies in these instances feels like a cheat.
Nobody ever said this was gonna be easy.