Publishing deleted scenes – risky, cringeworthy, helpful? Lari Don

Publishers want lots of ‘stuff’ from authors now. Not just the book, but lots of other stuff. Content, it’s called, for online things.

One of the bits of content I’ve given my publishers recently is a file of deleted scenes, from my new(ish) teen thriller Mind Blind.

It wasn’t hard for me to find half a dozen deleted scenes, because I delete lots from my manuscripts as I rewrite and redraft. It’s not unusual for me to reduce the length of a book by 20,000 words or more between first draft and final publication. Which sounds very inefficient – wouldn’t I be better just writing shorter books in the first place?

But I’m not a planner and plotter. I discover the story as I write, as I follow the characters on their journey, and that means diversions and doubling back. I never deliberately write anything that I know is irrelevant at the time, every word helps me find out about the characters, their reactions to problems and my own feelings about the story. But once I reach the end and get a sense of the main thrust of the story, it’s usually clear that I've regularly wandered off the narrative path, and that some scenes are now unnecessary. They may have been necessary to get me to the end, but they’re not necessary to get the reader to the end. So I'm ruthless in slashing them out. I reckon that if you can slice out a scene without it seriously affecting the rest of the story, it probably wasn’t that important.

And in a thriller like MindBlind, where it’s very important to keep the pace up and the pages turning, I also removed scenes or parts of scenes because they slowed the story down too much. (Here’s an example of one.)

And sometimes I cut a scene, not because it’s slowing the story down or because it’s an unnecessary diversion, but because I come up with a stronger idea once I know the story and characters better. However, the original scene is still part of the way I got to know the character, so it’s part of my history with them. Here’s an example of that – it’s the first scene I ever wrote about Ciaran Bain, the hero (anti-hero) of the book. It’s not in the book, but it’s still the place I first met him!

Of course, it’s misleading to suggest that all this slashing and slicing is my idea. Quite a lot of it is, but some of it is in response to gentle prompts from my wonderful editor.

a mountain of many Mind Blind manuscripts

So, I have no problem removing large chunks of my first draft or even my fourteenth draft, because as I’m writing, I know that I’m just discovering the story, not finding the perfect way of telling it first time around. And I know that it takes a lot of work to make that original mess of scribbled ideas into a book.

But having taken all this stuff out, why on earth would I want to show it to anyone? These deleted scenes have often been removed quite early in the process, so they’re not that polished (why would I polish them, once I’ve deleted them?) So it does feel quite weird and slightly uncomfortable, revealing these unfinished bits of my creative process to the public gaze.

Even if these are scenes that I took out for plot or pace reasons, rather than pieces of writing I don’t like, they are still parts of the story that didn’t make it into the book. So is it a bit of a risk to show less than perfect examples of your writing to the world? And why on earth do it?

The first reason is the pragmatic one of feeding the voracious social media monster. (This is not a particularly good reason.)

But I wonder if a much better reason is that realising how much an author cuts from their early drafts can be useful, especially for young writers. It’s a very practical way to show that published writers don’t get it right all the time, that our first drafts are just the start of the process and that we have to work at them, slash at them, perhaps radically change them, to get them into shape. Deleted scenes are perhaps the online version of showing manuscripts covered in lots of scribbles and scorings out to groups of kids at author visits. ‘Look, I don’t get it right first time, so you don’t have to either. Just write, and see what happens!’

So, while I was wincing and cringing this week as yet another deleted scene appeared on Tumblr, I wondered:
How much do other writers delete?
Are other writers happy to let the world see the bits they sliced out?
And do readers learn anything about the writing process from deleted scenes?

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 21 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. 

Lari’s website 

Lari’s own blog

Lari on Twitter

Lari on Facebook

Lari on Tumblr

Out of Synch... Savita Kalhan

In the past I’ve blogged about my pattern of ‘Writing with the Seasons’ on ABBA, and how it’s always worked for me, but over the last few years it’s all gone out of sync – not just the whole writing with the seasons thing, but my entire routine and writing process.

 

Various factors have contributed to this, which I won’t bore you with, but they have had a major impact. It’s not that I haven’t been writing, because I have, but not quite in the same way.

Reworking a manuscript is a very different kettle of fish to writing a new book.

With a new agent and fresh eyes on my work, I spent the first part of the year re-working a manuscript that is very close to my heart, and by the end of that process I was quite happy with the end result. I am now reworking a second manuscript, which I am finding much harder going. The voice of the main character eluded me for a long time, and I couldn’t understand why. It was only when I switched to the first person that things started to click and fall into place.
But this is when I come to the writing with the season thing. I know my most productive time of year for writing is autumn and winter and spring. Not the summer. The summer has always been the most distracting time of year, firstly because of school holidays,(although my teen is now old enough to arrange his own distractions, which he happily does!) family holiday, the sunshine, the allotment, the tennis, the...you get the idea. Routine disappears and with it the word count plummets and the guilt rises. There are too many offers for a game of tennis, the swing seat and a good book are always beckoning, the weeds on the allotment need to be kept under control, and there way too many courgettes to give away and recipes to look up!

What’s the answer? Well, we all know that writers never fully switch off, that story ideas, scenes and characters are always percolating in the grey matter, and that a break from writing is good and necessary, and that a holiday is essential. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t get the present re-write re-written, which has to be done before the end of summer. For my own peace of mind I need to be back in synch.



First crop of cherries for my two year old tree

Without the external pressure of a looming deadline, and the self-imposed deadline not working as it does at other times of the year, it’s all about time management for the summer months for me now: allotting hours of the day, days of the week to the current re-write and fully committing to them, and if that means turning off the phone, the internet, and dare I say it, Facebook and Twitter and the rest of it, then so be it.
Well, that’s the plan...





Third time lucky garlic crop



Four varieties of potatoes

My website

Twitter @savitakalhan

Are we human, or are we pantsers?

“Where do you get your ideas?”

It’s an oft asked question, posed by both adults and children alike. I’ve blogged about this subject before, but it occurred to me the other day that, for me, it’s not getting the ideas, but trying to throttle them back that’s a problem, because this question goes hand-in-hand with another one: how do you know when a book is really finished? New, fiendishly clever plot and character ideas seem to constantly bombard me when I’m writing, often coming when I’m least expecting them (my muse is a particularly devious so-and-so, often waiting until I’m half asleep before dropping the mother-of-all-ideas into my unguarded consciousness), and when I have one of these great ideas, I feel almost bound to incorporate it into my work. If I don’t, it hangs around in the back of my mind whispering, “This could be SO much better if you’d only do what you know needs to be done and go rewrite those first five chapters,”

I’m a ‘pantser’. For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, it’s a term (I don’t think it’s meant to be derogatory, but it has that ring to it, doesn’t it?) to describe somebody who doesn’t plot, but just sits down and writes. It’s a more ‘organic’ approach to writing, and I think it gets me into a lot of trouble at times. What it does do, however, is allow me to embrace new ideas in to my work in a way that a plotter may not so easily be able to. On the negative side, pantsers are more likely to work in a more back-and-forth manner, jumping around as their muse dripfeeds them, rewriting large sections of the book as the narrative takes shape in their mind. It’s a fun, sometimes infuriating way in which to work.

But as any pantser will tell you, there has to be an end to this at some stage. As much as you love and cherish your muse (even a nefarious, sleep-wrecking one), there has to come a point when you put your fingers in your ears and do the la-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you. If you can’t do that, you’re destined never to finish the book. You’ll spend the rest of your life trying to write the perfect book, turn into a gibbering madman, or simply give up your dreams of becoming an author.

I don’t think there’s a writer alive who can look at one of their books and says, “Yep, that’s pretty much perfect.” We all would like one last chance to edit it again and change the sentence/paragraph/chapter that really grates on us now the book is up there on the shelf. The ideas continue to come, even when the book has rolled off the printing press. It’s infuriating.

All that said, I wouldn’t have it any other way. So, long may my nights be blighted by the big man with the scary voice, the tattoos and the beard who whispers those ideas into my head. And long may my stories struggle to win the race to the finish line.

Writer - Rewrite! Ruth Symes / Megan Rix

                                   Writer - Rewrite!
                              Ruth Symes / Megan Rix

When I started my writing career I hated re-writing. I wrote so fast it seemed to me that it was a whole lot easier to just write a new book than re-write the one I’d just written – which I was usually more than a teensy bit tired of anyway.

 But then a book or two down the line I started to think rewriting might not be so bad after all. Not just tweaking mind – a proper rewrite.  My opinion of rewriting changed  - due to a few rewriting success stories.

The first thing that happened was that after two books being taken and me thinking I’d cracked it the next 3 or 4 couldn’t find a publishing home. Audrey Adams was an editor at Andersen at the time and she kindly made a few editorial suggestions and the next thing I knew the horror story I’d written about the dangers of blind-dating (this was in 2000 – yikes – so long ago!) had turned into a comedy and Andersen published it as The Mum Trap – still in print 10 years on.

The next re-writing success story is even better:

I’ve always written for both print and broadcast and I wrote a script called ‘Merry Meet’ while on the MA in TV Scriptwriting course at Leicester DeMontfort University. Merry Meet was the pilot for a one hour TV show about an ex-witch trying to lead a normal life without magic. The script was selected by the Screenwriters Festival as one of the scripts they wanted to promote that year. They arranged for it to have a professional script reading and I was presented with a script report on my work.

Editors at publishing houses I realised, as I read the report, even the ones who seem fierce, are really sweet kittens compared to the killer dog savagery of a script report writer. No holds barred – that report went for the jugular and tore my script to shreds.

Afterwards I was told by a surprised producer that it was one of the kinder reports and I shouldn’t be so sensitive about my work – who knew???

Anyway, I started to rewrite Merry Meet and as I did so I began to think about what my lead character might have been like before she gave up magic. Was she born a witch or did she become one? And as I was thinking this I suddenly knew just what she was like as a girl and even what she sounded like.

I finished re-writing my one hour script but at the same time I started writing the first chapter and synopsis of a children’s novel about a young witch.

Piccadilly had just published one of my picture books - about a dinosaur called Little Rex - and so I mentioned this idea I had for a series of books about a witchling called Bella Donna to them, and Ruth Williams, the editor there, thought they might be very interested – but would like it written for a slightly younger market than I’d been thinking of.

More re-writes later ‘Bella Donna’ Book 1 in the Coven Road series was published in October 2010, ‘Too Many Spells’ was published in April 2011 and ‘Witchling’ came out at the beginning of October – a fourth’s just been commissioned.


As for the script – that isn’t doing much - although I might just need to take another look at it. And that blind dating horror idea could be good – maybe it’s time for some more rewriting!

Ruth's website is at www.ruthsymes.com
Megan's website is at www.meganrix.com