The first novel draft I ever finished (not counting my Thorn Birds ripoff in middle school, which I do not) was a political thriller with historical elements I wrote during my first attempt at NaNoWriMo in 2009.

From the Grassy Knoll was about an historian and a government archivist who stumbled across proof of a CIA/Cuban conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy which somehow involved Fidel Castro being an double agent for our government. It was… not a good book.

I had a lot of fun writing it, however. Mostly I laughed a lot at how bad it was. But I remember writing one scene that I was incredibly proud of – until I read it again months later and realized just how ridiculously far-fetched its premise was (as opposed to the rest of my plot? Debatable).

I wrote about a young Archives Technician working at NARA in DC who was seduced by a Cuban spy to gain entry to the archive stacks, where she was murdered so the spy could steal the incriminating document. I loved the scene because I had visited NARA in 2008 and remembered touring the stacks, and really wanted to write a scene describing what they looked like. But unless my spy was the worst spy in the world, and NARA security was unconcerned with letting staff bring total strangers into the building after hours, my scene made no sense.

I’ve heard before that writing often requires you to kill that which you love. I know that had I pursued editing my political thriller manuscript, one of its (many, many) casualties in rewrites would have been that awesome description of the NARA stacks. Then again, maybe I could have found another home for those words, if I really tried.