What to do with good work that just doesn't quite fit?

[Hammerhand]

To those who plan and structure the story before they write it, please give me some tips on this, though I'm sure its been discussed a thousand times so feel free to point to some articles you've found useful on the matter.

I was talking to a friend about my story over a coffee. I had to summarise what I had done and speculate what I wanted the story to do up to the end. I had to squeeze all this into about 20 minutes, so the descriptions were pretty brief. My friend was suitably impressed with the storyline and gave me a few suggestions, but the best thing he had done for me was to ask about it. By summarising the twists and turns the way I did, I had a very loose structure to build upon.

As soon as I bought Scrivener (brilliant by the way), I found it quite easy to put my summaries onto the scene record cards and flesh them out a little. You could do the same with real record cards I suppose. Using the record cards made it easy to re-arrange scenes and to add scenes in where necessary, all the while retaining the story's direction.

Although ultimately, I got to the end and had to re-work it a little [as moaned about in my blog!], I don't think I would ever have got there without that fateful coffee break.

I suppose you could try the same with a friend or even record yourself talking about your aspirations for the story, and summarise what you've done as if you are trying to describe it in a nutshell, like a mini synopsis. Leave it for a week or so and then listen back. pick out the bits you like and put them onto record cards and alter the bits you don't find as appealing. Flesh out the record cards and then take each one as an assignment. Having this set up really helped me to set manageable deadlines.

Hope this helps.

 

[Galacticdefender]

What I tend to do with random bits of background information that I just can't fit in anywhere, I'll write a short story.

 

[Coragem]

I spent a couple of months planning my plot and building my world before I began writing. I've paused regularly since then to tweak my plotting.

Some writers don't plot before they begin, and some great novels have been written that way. However, I think these writers are sometimes less consistent than planners. An unplanned novel "may" just come together, but it may not. And personally I'd rather anticipate plot holes in the planning phase, rather than find myself in a hole after writing 100,000 words!

Even though I plan, I've still had to delete material. And it has been very painful! For example, early on I used to begin most scenes with an (often humorous) lead in. Later I got the feeling that some of these lead in sequences took some of the impact away from the "meat" of the scenes. Although the material was well written I had to make myself discard it.

I'm a very slow writer, which makes discarding work particularly painful – sometimes a couple of pages can represent weeks of toil.

Coragem.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I upset many writers with my attitude to it, but that is what my delete key is for. My usual technique is 1. Write draft, 2. Read draft, 3. Bin draft - start again from scratch. I find that gets rid of most of the rubbish. When I am writing getting the story the best I can and as tight as I can is my goal.

I used to do something like that. I'd delete the file, start a brand new one and type in the story from the beginning, but using hard copy of the previous draft to work from. If you have to type in every single word again, it can prevent you from taking the easy way out and keeping something that doesn't work just because it's already there. If you have to go to the labor of typing it all over again, you're more likely to take the extra trouble to get it right. (Mind you, everyone thought I was insane for doing it that way, but I'd started out writing my first novels on a typewriter, and each new draft did, of necessity, have to be typed in from scratch. So it was nothing new for me, and I thought it kept me honest.)

On the other hand, just in case the new way wasn't (on further consideration) an improvement on the old one, I had the hard copy.

There is nothing as frustrating as realizing that you wrote a section better the first time, but you can't remember the exact wording and you didn't keep any sort of copy. (Been there. Done that.)

*****

As for reusing the parts we discard. I disagree with those who say we can always use them somewhere else. That's to imply that all one's books have cookie-cutter characters and cookie-cutter plots. The truth is, we may never be able to keep that brilliantly written paragraph or scene, because the situation will never come up again. (Why should it?)

But if you can't always use it another time, sometimes you can, so it's best to keep it stashed somewhere you can find it at need.