How I Wrote the Hardest Chapter
Every book has one chapter that refuses. For Loves Without Flaws it was the ninth, the argument in the kitchen, which I drafted nine times over five months and very nearly cut entirely.
The problem was not the words. It was that I kept writing the argument I wanted them to have rather than the one they would actually have. Elena was too articulate. Marcus was too obviously wrong. Real couples fight badly, in fragments, about the wrong thing entirely, and I was writing a debate.
“Neither of them is allowed to say what they mean. That single rule, written on the back of a receipt, unlocked five months of failure in an afternoon.”
What finally broke it was a walk, and then a rule: neither of them is allowed to say what they mean. Once I took away their eloquence, the scene wrote itself in an afternoon and became the passage readers write to me about most often.
I keep the discarded drafts in a folder marked simply “nine”. Occasionally I reread them to remind myself that competence is not the same thing as truth.
Arnold Newman is the award-winning author of seven novels exploring love, memory, and the quiet machinery of family life. His work has been translated into a dozen languages and adapted twice for the stage. Before turning to fiction, he spent years as a journalist, an experience that taught him to listen closely and mistrust easy answers. He lives by the coast with his wife and far too many books.
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