you could post the scrap as an au drabble
Jan. 19th, 2016 01:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1QjMeUj:
I could, but here’s the thing– sometimes that works, and I have some plans to go back and do that in some older works, someday if I become less prolific– but a lot of times, these things are tossed out for a reason. The basic bones of it aren’t stable, but all the character notes are good, in this case. I had two characters I didn’t know well, and a third character I knew well whose POV it absolutely wasn’t, and I spent 10k flailing, having plot just– happen– and it won’t hold together, not even as an outtake. But all the good parts of it– I mean, I sorted the plot for *the entire work*, including the 50k of stuff that I’d thought was mostly finished beforehand– the good parts of it will work beautifully if i start over and build a new framework.
Nothing is ever wasted. Nothing is ever really thrown away. I don’t ever delete things; I sometimes even save a copy and do my revisions in a new draft, if I’m getting rid of a major direction. Anything more than a couple of paragraphs, I hang onto. Because you never know. It all gets reused eventually.
(The really hard part is when you have ¾ of something good, and eventually realize you’ll never get the other ¼, and you should just recycle the parts, and god, that’s hard, to go through and strip out the good parts, because it’s usually enough that you have to discard the old thing afterward. It’s hard! But it’s important and it helps you make stronger things going forward.)
I could, but here’s the thing– sometimes that works, and I have some plans to go back and do that in some older works, someday if I become less prolific– but a lot of times, these things are tossed out for a reason. The basic bones of it aren’t stable, but all the character notes are good, in this case. I had two characters I didn’t know well, and a third character I knew well whose POV it absolutely wasn’t, and I spent 10k flailing, having plot just– happen– and it won’t hold together, not even as an outtake. But all the good parts of it– I mean, I sorted the plot for *the entire work*, including the 50k of stuff that I’d thought was mostly finished beforehand– the good parts of it will work beautifully if i start over and build a new framework.
Nothing is ever wasted. Nothing is ever really thrown away. I don’t ever delete things; I sometimes even save a copy and do my revisions in a new draft, if I’m getting rid of a major direction. Anything more than a couple of paragraphs, I hang onto. Because you never know. It all gets reused eventually.
(The really hard part is when you have ¾ of something good, and eventually realize you’ll never get the other ¼, and you should just recycle the parts, and god, that’s hard, to go through and strip out the good parts, because it’s usually enough that you have to discard the old thing afterward. It’s hard! But it’s important and it helps you make stronger things going forward.)
