My writing this week proves that creating novels sometimes mirrors real life. We make choices every of our lives. And those choices sometimes put us down paths we didn’t intend. I’m sure the choice looked promising at first, so did the choice I made for my characters. However, when I got down the path, and pretty far down the path might I add, I realized my characters were going in the wrong direction. Was it moving the plot forward, yes, but I could see a better way, a stronger path for the story.

Just as in real life, I’d done a hard thing, I admitted I’d made a mistake—but what to do now? The chapter was almost finished, nobody would ever know I’d thought of a better way if I just left it alone, except I would always know.

Yes, it’s hard to admit our mistakes, but it takes courage to do something about it. For me that meant deleting a week’s worth of work and starting over. We can do the same in our lives. Okay, maybe there’s a not a delete button, but we can still change if we don’t like where we are headed. That’s the great thing about life, we get to choose what we’ll make of it.