No, recasting a scene doesn’t mean trying it again with different personnel. It’s about change the shape of events. Stories aren’t “cast in stone” until they’re sent to the printers.
My editor suggested that I recast some of the events of the third chapter of my YA novel with respect to interactions and emotions. And when I studied her analysis of what was going on, I knew that her emotional response was right on the money.
I also had some work to do on one of the love interests in the book. I liked him a lot, but some of the publisher’s in-house readers thought he was a bit of a creep. A creep! That clearly had to be fixed.
Darcy Pattison, the author of several picture books and the Novel Metamorphosis revision workbook has saidsomething along the lines of how you actually have two books when you finish a project: the one on your hard-drive and the one in your head. Part of the editorial process is to make these two visions for the project line up.
Chapter 3 will need more tweaking, but I think I’ve put things onto the right glide path now.
Kristin Wolden Nitz 
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