Editing Rant: Don’t Force Things

Acquired from the internet hive mind

Don’t force things. After carefully building a world with rules and characters, with permanent objects and time-line consistency, why, oh why, is a character doing something out-of-character? Oh, plot point. The writer wants this beautiful scene to happen.

NO!

(red lines everywhere)

Forcing an action destroys both the hole and the peg – scene and character no longer are “believable”.