Sometimes the best writing is the writing you delete.

Every novel has ghosts — not the supernatural kind, but the characters who once walked the page before you gently escorted them out. While writing Beyond the Well, I came across several women who intrigued me with their backstories, flaws, motives, and voices.

And yet…
they didn’t belong.

This is the quiet discipline of storytelling: knowing when to let go.
Not every character is meant to stay, even if you love them. Some crowd the narrative. Some dilute the emotional arc. Some are simply too loud for the space they’re in.

Here are a few of the women who didn’t make the final manuscript — and why removing them ultimately made Beyond the Well stronger, and kept character development for me moving forward.

Yaffa — The Midwife Who Belonged to Another Story

Yaffa was one woman whom I thought of writing in this story, but somehow knew she belonged to another story. Yaffa, a wise and hurried traveling midwife whom time had made soft and sharp – just like women in Old Testament – carried herbs in her sash and the trust of many in her authority.

I imagined her as deeply observant — the sort of woman who notices when a girl hides her trembling hands or when the silence of a wife becomes too heavy to carry alone.

In an early draft, Yaffa arrived at Photine’s home shortly after her marriage to Jotham. She brought medicinal teas, a basket of dried figs, and what I lovingly call “midwife truth” — the kind that feels like comfort and warning at the same time.

She offered Photine her first real moment of gentle, woman-to-woman counsel:
wisdom about marriage, survival, and the quiet kinds of strength women are expected to master.

She recognized Photine’s fire long before Photine ever dared name it.

Yaffa was wonderful — too wonderful, in fact.

She softened the story long before the story earned softness.
Her presence gave Photine a lifeline too early, a place for emotional healing when the reader needed to feel the ache of her isolation. Yaffa also competed with the later and far more important connection Photine developed with Lois. Two wise women in close succession muddled the arc, and Lois needed the full narrative space to take root.

But the biggest reason?

Yaffa belonged to another story.

As I worked, I realized she carried shadows and threads that didn’t originate in Photine’s world at all. Her voice felt older, deeper, more scarred — as if she had already lived through overcoming oppression, love, and sacrifice, and a story that Photine’s book wasn’t meant to tell.

And I eventually understood why.

Yaffa didn’t disappear.
She simply stepped aside until her own story was ready.

Readers will meet her — not in Beyond the Well, but in the book that follows it, where her history, her losses, and her role as a midwife take center stage in a much darker, more emotionally complex narrative.

Deleting her here wasn’t an ending.
It was an act of narrative restraint — and a quiet promise.

Narrative restraint also means emotional restraint.
Sometimes a story gains power by limiting who gets to comfort the heroine and when.

Yaffa’s absence strengthened Photine’s early chapters…
and her presence will strengthen another woman’s journey later.

Tizah — The Marketplace Woman Who Became Photine (Eventually)

Tizah was a spirited woman, with a basket on one arm and a voice that could pierce through crowded markets. She was quick-witted, observant, and had a memorable charm.

In early drafts, she felt like a breath of relief. Someone who could offer Photine a moment of sisterhood amidst the harshness of her early life.

She walked into Photine’s marketplace scenes with instant familiarity, teasing her into confidence, sharing figs, and offering gentle, knowing commentary about the men who tried to out-bargain her, and also offering a sense of female empowerment in Scripture. She was warm, grounded, competent — and she seemed to understand Photine instinctively.

But that was the problem.

Tizah didn’t just pull focus.
She blurred the line between who Photine was and who Photine would become.

Every time Tizah stepped onto the page, I realized she was carrying pieces of my protagonist’s future self—the boldness she earns later, the humor sharpened through survival, the marketplace competence she develops only after trauma reshapes her life.

If Tizah stayed, she would give Photine too soft a landing. And worse, she would steal Photine’s arc of faith and perseverance, and personal growth through faith.

Tizah represented the finished version of a woman Photine had not yet grown into.
And Photine needed the space to earn every step of that transformation.

So I made a choice I didn’t expect:
I didn’t just delete Tizah.
I absorbed her.

Her quick tongue.
Her steady confidence.
Her ability to read a room full of men and find the seam of power.
All of these belonged to Photine — just not yet.

Removing Tizah wasn’t killing a character.
It was giving Photine room to breathe, grow, and become the woman she was meant to be.

Tizah doesn’t have a place in my current manuscripts — because she’s alive inside another woman’s evolution. But I suspect readers might one day encounter echoes of her, another sharp, resilient woman in the marketplace of a future story, or perhaps a descendant of the fire she carried.

Characters who resonate never truly disappear.
They wait.
They shift.
They return in new forms.

Some characters aren’t distracting because they’re unnecessary.
They’re distracting because they’re premature.

Tizah was the woman Photine would one day grow into.
And when you give a character their own shadow too early, the reader can’t feel the weight of their becoming.

Her absence allowed Photine’s vulnerability to matter.
Her absorption into Photine allowed Photine’s strength to feel earned.

And once again, narrative restraint revealed its quiet truth:
Sometimes the character you delete is really the character you’re still writing.