Just when I was ready to give up hope and settle for something second-rate, the last scene of Bounds of Decorum finally crystalized for me. I've been fighting with it for months, and no matter what I did, it seemed anticlimactic. I needed a conversation between Elizabeth and Darcy after their wedding, and I tried doing it outside the church (insufficiently private) at the wedding breakfast (unintelligible due to interruptions) and on the carriage ride to London (boring, boring, boring! I wouldn't want to spend time with those people!). The tone was always slightly off, too, not enough humor and happiness to balance the serious elements.

Follow up:

Then I started thinking about it in terms of plot structure, something I usually avoid, and looking at where there was unfinished business, and going back to the beginning to see if that had any clues. It suddenly hit me that the scene had to be at Moorsfield where Elizabeth and Darcy had struggled to connect to each other. So I told the horses to get off their butts on the side of the London road and hie themselves to Moorsfield. Once I had the characters there, the scene just flowed out, always a tremendously satisfying feeling.

The interesting thing was that I ended up pitching all of the planned conversation and going with something completely new - and completely old. Back ages ago when I was first drafting the outline of Bounds of Decorum, I intended the story to end much earlier, and I'd written a disconnected final scene for it, just a bit of fluff. Halfway through writing the scene tonight, I realized that old scene was precisely what I needed to complete this scene. So I scavenged it out of an old file, dusted it off a little, and there it was, just perfect. It had been intended for a different time, a different place, and an earlier Elizabeth & Darcy, but somehow, with the lightest of edits, it worked just perfectly now. How strange is that? Apparently there was something to my first instincts, or maybe it was just that I wasn't bogged down with a complex story line at that point.

So I had the delightful experience of finishing the scene and knowing exactly where it was supposed to end (something I usually struggle with), with the tone and pacing I wanted. The story isn't really done yet, since there are a few blanks to fill in, and a rather important epilogue yet to come, but I'm much clearer on what that holds. Epilogues are nice that way, since it's all wrapping up strings, and I have enough loose ends in Bounds of Decorum to start my own macrame store.

Nothing deep to say tonight - but I spend so much time here lamenting about writer's block that I thought I should share a moment when the writing is actually working!