The Line That Stopped Me

A Life’s Thread from my experience in writing Whispers of Echo Canyon

I was three pages from the end when the canyon spoke.

I stopped dead in my tracks moments before I was ready to write “The End” of my debut novel.

Not because I didn’t know what came next. I did. The women were where they needed to be. I could see the ending clearly enough to write it.

That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was a single line I hadn’t planned.

The canyon spoke.

I sat there longer than I care to admit, reading it over and over. Because that wasn’t what I had been writing. I was stunned. Who said that?

I stepped away to consider what just happened. I’d achieved my goal of 80,000 words in Whispers of Echo Canyon. I’m impatient in most things I do. I wanted to be done.

The canyon spoke.

But it’s a place. Does this matter?

In a way, of course it did. The canyon holds the women. It shapes how they move, what they notice, what they ignore. But it’s still a place. A powerful one, but still something they walked through.

This was different.

This wasn’t Raven, my 70-year-old protagonist, listening. This wasn’t her intuition. This wasn’t her making meaning out of silence.

The canyon spoke.

And I hadn’t written anything that prepared for that.

I looked at the rest of the chapter, then back at that line. Because now I had a dilemma. I needed to make a choice.

I could leave it. Delete the line, finish the book, and no one would ever know it had been there. That was the easy way out. Was that what I wanted?

But once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It was an intriguing thought. Something different. I like different.

The canyon spoke.

I wrestled with this for days. I debated pretending I hadn’t heard it. The need for a decision rarely left my thoughts.

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