After five grueling hours today
the penultimate chapter of Angie's Choice succumbed to a
rewrite. "Bent at the waist, her hands pressed against the deeply creviced, sticky bark of a Ponderosa, Angie looked down at her feet and gasped for air. Her legs wobbled unsteadily beneath her. For the moment, she could think of nothing but the painful sensation of her laboring lungs and the burning rip of air dragged into her windpipe. After a time, as her breathing came easier, she heard both her captors also gasping for breath. She knew she could run no farther.
"She'd lost a shoe miles back and reached down to feel the bottom of her bare foot, but its skin was so numb she couldn't tell what the damage was. Jake had been shoving and dragging Angie along for hours through the darkness, both stumbling over rocky ground and carpets of pine needles, scrambling up hills and sliding down steeper slopes. Twice, they splashed ankle-deep through cold, rushing streams. Occasionally, from the vantage of higher elevations, they caught the gleam of flashlights flickering between trees. A helicopter had thumped its way overhead a couple of times, but it’s searchlight couldn’t penetrate the thick forest canopy shielding their movements. Lately they’d heard hounds baying in the distance. Once or twice, a human voice shouted loudly enough to be heard."
Writing at my age is filled with difficulties. For the scene I worked on today with three characters on the run in a forest, I had to keep going back to remember who was sitting down or leaning against a tree or on his or her feet. Those are continuity details important to the veracity of a scene. An old writer, in a hurry as I was this morning, can make distracting errors if his inner eye forgets those details. A man is on his feet who just a moment before was lying on his back. "When did he get to his feet," the reader will ask, and who can blame her?
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