The draft I ruined by letting them kiss on page forty

I once wrote two hundred pages I had to throw in the bin, and I did it on purpose, and I would do it again, because it taught me the one thing about this job I most needed to learn.

The book was going beautifully. She was a cartographer, he mapped the same coast for a rival patron, and they loathed each other in the specific way that only two people who are paying very close attention can manage. By page forty they were impossible. The air between them could have powered a small town. So one night, tired and a little pleased with myself, I let them kiss.

It was a wonderful scene. I remember being thrilled with it. I went to bed certain I had written the best thing in the book, and in a narrow sense I had. The trouble was the other two hundred and sixty pages, which I now had to write, and which had quietly died while I was not looking.

Here is what nobody tells you when you start. The kiss is not the prize. The kiss is the roof, and once you put the roof on you cannot keep adding floors underneath it. Everything that had been holding the book up, the misread letters, the maddening politeness, the way she drew his stretch of coast slightly wrong on purpose and he noticed and said nothing, all of it was the wanting, and the wanting cannot survive being answered on page forty. I had spent the best fuel I had to warm one evening.

I kept that scene for a week before I accepted what I had done. Then I cut it, and the two hundred pages after it, and I started again from page thirty nine with a single rule: nobody was allowed to get what they wanted until they had very nearly lost it instead. The book took another year. It is the only one of mine my mother rereads.

I tell new writers this and I can see them not believing me, because the pull to let the characters be happy is enormous, and it feels like kindness. It is not kindness. The reader did not come for the characters to be comfortable. The reader came to be kept on the edge of the chair, and the moment you make the people on the page comfortable you have shown the reader to the door and thanked them for coming.

So now I write the whole book as a held breath and I do not let it out until the last possible page, and some nights I resent my own rule bitterly, sitting there with two people who are so clearly meant for each other and a cartographer's hand that so clearly wants to cross the table. Let them wait, I tell them. You will thank me. They never do. That is rather the point of them.

Wanting that takes its time is the whole story of The October Roses: roses that give nothing all summer and then bloom, alone and gloriously, when everything else is spent.