Took me 6 hours to hunt down a 3 line plot hole, the fix was one word

I was writing a chapter where a character crosses town to return a library book, but earlier I had her car in the shop. I kept rewriting the whole scene, adding bus routes, walk descriptions, even a rainstorm. Then I realized I just needed to change the book to a DVD she could mail back. Six hours for a single word swap. Does anyone else waste entire afternoons on details that end up being trivial, or am I just bad at stepping back?

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1 Comment

gracethomas4d ago

Six hours of staring at a bus schedule sounds like torture honestly. I get why you did it though. But I see it differently. If the whole scene hinges on the car being gone, then the bus ride or the walk should matter to the story somewhere. Like maybe she meets someone on the bus who changes her mind about something. If you just swap it to a DVD and mail it back, you lose whatever that travel time was doing for the plot or her headspace. The one word fix is clean, but it also erases a chance to make the story richer. Sometimes the detour is the point.