It has to hurt.. to get better...

I've been editing. The slow insanity driven hideous bone crushing pain of revision.
Words are good, but you want to make them better, a plot is beautiful, but you need to make it sing. You go along stabbing at every weak point just to see if it will give.
It reminds me of cows... There's an old story I heard about cattle. When you first introduce new cows to a new field, the cows will walk the entire fence line, and lean against the fence. They push at it, every step of the way, just to see if it will fall. If the fence doesn't fall, they accept the bounds, get off it, and leave it alone.
Building a story is similar to that process. You have to be willing to push at every weak spot, poke at every action, analyze every turn. It has to be strong enough to hold. If you leave a weak spot, a question that is never answered later in the tale, it becomes a hole, a void. Then, like cattle, your readers attention finds that hole and wanders through, leaving the world you've built.
Part of my struggle hasn't just been with the words themselves, but with the length. My tale is longer than most books should be. there are a half dozen ways to fix it, and I'm evaluating each one, but one thing I've learned, is that sometimes if you push on a story, the story pushes back.
I've considered deleting scenes, or changing the end to come together earlier, but sometimes deleting scenes is like pulling out whole chunks of a story. If the story doesn't need it, you can do that. But if the story needs the words and you remove too much, it's like yanking fence poles from your fence. The plot line gets weaker, you tear out too much, and it's too thin to hold. Or more appropriately, it's like pulling beams from a tower. A good story should hold up to scrutiny and most readers. You don't want a mid-game jenga tower of half-cobbled together ideas, lumpy in places, and barely staying upright.

I think the biggest question in my story is should I make it hurt less? Should I make the end come swifter and the fall less cutting? Should I spare the pain?
I know i'm going to get asked that, (and if my BETA readers are reading this I know they're getting nervous.) maybe by an agent, a publisher, or perhaps someday by a reader or in reviews.
The question will come... Why did you make it hurt? Why did it have to be so heartbreaking?

Because, my friends, anything less would have been a cheat. Anything less would have been a flaw. I believe in karma, and I believe in humanities ceaseless search for retribution. Right or wrong, bad things happen to good people. Right or wrong, good people become consumed with a desire to get back at those who wronged them. Right or wrong, forgiveness is an uncommon act that only comes with a sense of self sacrifice. You give up a part of yourself to let go of  a grudge.

What my character goes through is a trial by fire. All her flaws come back to haunt her in one guise or another and she has to overcome. She has to realize that the greatest enemy isn't the one outside, but the enemy within. The demons of rage and selfishness and yes, even blind loyalty, have consequence.
The hammer must fall. The curtain must close, and in the end we can't run from our choices.

This is still a redemption story... But the redemption doesn't happen right away. It wouldn't be a book series if everything happened right away. Like all things, spiritual growth takes time. Like life, spiritual growth takes pain.
You have to fall down, to get back up. You have to be sick to appreciate health.
And sometimes your petty choices drive you to the brink of ultimate loss and you find yourself at rock bottom.
But you know what the good news is about rock bottom?
There's nowhere to go but up.
I may need to make my story shorter, but the acts on the stage aren't going away. Hamlet still dies, and Macbeth still kills the king... Oh wait, that's not MY story. Regardless, these are constants. These are what make a story soar.
We see, through the pain of others, the uncomfortable truths about ourselves we might avoid.
And I aspire to tragedy.