She crossed out unnecessary adjectives.
She circled weak verbs.
She wrote comments in the margins.
What does your character actually want?
Why should the reader care?
You are avoiding the difficult part. Go back.
Owen complained constantly.
He also saved every page.
One afternoon in April, I found them sitting beneath Mrs. Parker’s apple tree.
Owen was reading Thomas’s letters again.
“Do you ever wish you’d answered differently?” he asked.
Mrs. Parker considered.
“If I’d received them?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course.”
“Would your whole life be different?”
“Probably.”
“Would it be better?”
She smiled.
“That’s impossible to know.”
Owen frowned.
“I hate answers like that.”
“I know.”
She looked around her garden.
At the daffodils.
At her little house.
At my son sitting beside her.
“You can spend your life imagining the roads you didn’t take,” she said. “But eventually you have to notice where the road you did take brought you.”
