Would you throw it away?

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Would you throw it away?

Post by zeldas_lullaby »

I was wondering, what would you do if you spent serious time writing several hundred or several thousand words, as part of a novel, but they lacked that special quality. Would you backspace it? Would you wait a day and then decide? Would you edit ad nauseam rather than rewrite the scene?

I personally would delete it and then try to figure out how to take it in the direction that would suit it better. This gives a feeling of loss, for the time and effort, but it often works best for me. Anyone else?
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Post by Ventis »

Delete it. I edit as I go, and I don't move forward until I'm happy with the scene or a chapter. If I feel they don't work, I'll scrap them and start again.

It's slower, but for me, it's more efficient, because it's easier for me to fix something while it's fresh, while my mind is still full of the scene, its mood and the effect I wanted to achieve. I tried to wait before edit, but it didn't work at all and it usually ended with a compromise. And I don't like compromises in my writing.
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Post by mtnhicks »

I may put it aside for later. Think of all the authors who almost threw away their works, or did, and someone found them and they became known for those works. Stephen King and Carrie.... enough said!
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Post by moderntimes »

This question has come to me in real life often. Most recently for my newly complete novel, 3rd in sequence, of my private detective guy. I was advised by someone who knows the stuff that my novel contained way too much "backstory" -- backstory is the background info that you need to add in a novel, telling about your characters and their history. But I had laid it on too much and it distracted from the story line.

So I took my novel and totally revised it. I added 5 new chapters near the beginning and they were much more lively and enjoyable. I then revised the remainder of the novel accordingly, deleting maybe 5000 to 8000 words and adding the same amount of totally new stuff. So the book was first "complete" last April and then with the rewrite, it was finally and "really complete" in October/November. So it took me months but it was worth it.

Never never delete anything! Save save save everything on your computer and keep it for later reference. Even if you retrieve maybe a half chapter that is still good, it's worth it. You delete it and it's gone forever. No reason to do this. Save everything.
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Post by Ventis »

moderntimes wrote:Never never delete anything! Save save save everything on your computer and keep it for later reference. Even if you retrieve maybe a half chapter that is still good, it's worth it. You delete it and it's gone forever. No reason to do this. Save everything.
You deleted 8000 words from the novel, because it wasn't good enough, but you keep them for later use. I'm curious - does that work for you? Have you ever used them? And if it was possible to improve them by editing, why didn't you do that in the first place?

I'm asking becaue it never worked for me. I used to have a folder with deleted scenes, but when I looked at them a few months or years later, they didn't seem usable at all - on the contrary, they looked even more appalling than before. >.> I never found anything worth reusing.
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Post by moderntimes »

Good question, ventis.

First, few writers can dash off 20 chapters of a novel without editing and revising them. I certainly cannot. So there's no way I could write something correctly and perfectly the first time. Lots of fledgling writers who've posted here are frustrated because their writing isn't very good and so they simply stop writing. That's like working out for physical fitness and quitting because you can't bench press 100 lbs at first. Wrong. You keep writing and improving.

I save everything mostly because there's zero reason to chuck it. My laptop has gigabytes of disk for storage and it's only about 1/25th full. Which means that there's essentially an infinite amount of storage for my Word docs. Deleting them is not necessary, even if I don't look back onto them.

But in reality, I do occasionally remember that I'd written about a certain character or a particular plot sequence, and dig it up and resurrect it, revise the idea so it's far better, and use it. Not always, but occasionally. I don't have an eidetic memory but it's pretty good, so I do remember things I've written.

Among those 8000 discarded words are occasional snippets or quotes or fairly clever asides or plot tweaks. They just were embedded in otherwise less-than-ideal text. So there's a gem or two lurking there.

During the age of handwritten manuscripts, sure, maybe discarding pages of scribbling might have made some sense, but when everything I write is straight to MS-Word and saved, it's just not sensible to delete a document permanently.

Part of this goes back to when I worked for a newspaper before computers, and everything was typewritten. For legal purposes, everything we wrote was saved in archives. We typed on a paper grade that was called "foolscap" and it was specially formulated to tear and break apart if you tried to erase it. So you NEVER erased anything. Instead, you'd backspace over something that you didn't want to say and would "XM" it. That meant you'd caps lock and type "X" and "M" with your 2 index fingers over the text, making it still readable but not usable. Then you'd type the new text. You never threw away a page, ever. It went into your archive folder. All the paper was also watermarked with the name of the newspaper and the tracking number of that sheaf or ream of paper. Bundles of this paper went into a big bundle and was warehoused somewhere, just like the Arc of the Covenant in the movie.

Our reporter's notebooks were special too. They were top-spiral notepads about 5x8 inches and also made from non-erasable paper. We checked out 10 notebooks at a time and each flip book was serial numbered and so we signed for them. We were instructed to never tear out a page, just flip to the new one. And when our notebooks were full, they also went to archives.

So this habit of never discarding anything I wrote was drilled into me when I wrote for a newspaper. With computers, it became a lot easier for me to save things. Also later, when I worked in engineering consultancy, legal reasons again for never discarding any calculations or programming work, everything was archived onto backup tape reels.

Anyway, I'll often have several versions of a chapter, each labeled "ch15a" and "ch15b" and so on. Later, as I consolidate my writing, I'll copy certain sections of each chapter version into a new more permanent "ch15" in a different "folder" and build a more permanent version of the novel. For example, my latest novel is titled "Blood Vengeance" so a folder may be "veng-chap" and then in that folder are all the a,b,c versions of the chapters. And then a new folder "veng-final" will just contain "ch01" and "ch02" etc. and then the compiled full novel under a doc "Blood Vengeance" that contains all the chapters merged together.

And yeah, as you say, going back and looking at older stuff, I rarely see anything salvageable but occasionally there's a turn of phrase that is good. And even if not, it serves me to see how much better the new stuff is, and I can say "Can't believe I wrote this junk" and learn from that. But delete it permanently? Nope. No reason to.

Works for me.
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Post by johappy »

I wouldn't throw it away. I'd keep it as a rough draft and start over. I've done it before. It's better than looking back and wishing you still had it.
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Post by moderntimes »

Correct, jo. Always keep the chaff -- there may be wheat too.
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Post by Sophia_Buehler »

I usually just keep it on my computer as a file. I have a specific folder just for those kinds of things so that if I want to go back and re-use it (with revision, of course) I can. But that doesn't always work for everyone, I figure.
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Post by zeldas_lullaby »

Yeah, I get upset when I write something unusable. Not because I wasted time writing it, but because it's a bit demoralizing to have created something with my characters that ultimately feels flat or unauthentic. (Inauthentic?) Makes me think of that one episode of Frasier where the writing is just downright awful. (The episode has Kristen Chenoweth in it, if anyone's wondering which episode.)

I think I intuit it, though--the other day I wrote a scene and I almost wanted to scrap it, but I didn't. Today I clicked "undo" and the deletions reappeared and I was able to use that scene. So that worked out.

-- 16 Jun 2015, 00:07 --

Oh, hey, welcome to the site, Sophia!!
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Post by moderntimes »

Sophia_Buehler wrote:I usually just keep it on my computer as a file. I have a specific folder just for those kinds of things so that if I want to go back and re-use it (with revision, of course) I can. But that doesn't always work for everyone, I figure.
This is what I highly recommend, keeping your "bad" stuff anyway, just dump it into a "misc junk" file. Doesn't take up much space and occasionally, you will find yourself remembering some snippet or excerpt or clever statement or whatever, and be able to use it, either directly or maybe revise it or let it trigger a spark of creativity.

Something I've saved for a couple years, to appear in a future mystery novel that I'll write... the bad guy is a murderer and he's of Vietnamese extraction, his surname "Park" and he's confronted in a finale by my private eye:

"You killed that girl, Park," I told him.
He smiled. "Maybe I did. So what. And it's pronounced 'Pak' -- the 'r' is silent."
"So are you, now," I said, and shot him in the head.


Little things like that.

-- 16 Jun 2015, 09:19 --

On this topic, yesterday I was chatting with a pal of mine, a poet and writer with a substantial history in literature. He knew Joyce Carol Oates and he told me that she'd be in school (they were classmates) and she'd idly write short stories and novel excerpts just out of boredom and throw them away. Lost literature.
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Post by zanderlyrose »

I would keep it as well. Sometimes it is good to look back and try to see what it is you were thinking at the time. As others have said, storage space is nothing these days.
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Post by Ventis »

LOL I'm glad to hear about Joyce Carol Oates - I was beginning to think I'm the only one. :roll:
I don't see these excerpts and things I delete as 'literature'. For me, they're 'junk'. It's not the matter of space at all, I just don't see the reason to keep it. It's like storing old clothes, that you didn't wear for ages - and probably never will, because it's by now 3 sizes smaller, doesn't fit your style, and obsolete. It might have been great once, and you might have looked gorgeous in it at that time. But then is then and now is now.

"No man ever steps in the same river twice." I don't wear the same clothes I used to wear years back - and don't write the same things, either. I'm a different person. And just like old clothes, these deleted snippets, chapters or stories only make sense in their own context. Including a snippet of dialogue into another story... that's unimaginable for me.

When I begin a new project I always start with the characters. I give them their unique personality, their voice, I have to have a good grasp about them. Only when I can clearly see and hear them in my mind, I invite them to tell me their story. If I delete a part of the story or a dialogue, it's because
- it didn't fit their personality, their story arc or the purpose of the story. In order to use such snippet, I'd have to back-construct a character to specifically fit the snippet. And that always resulted in lifeless abominations parading as charactes.
- I abandoned the story - the idea wasn't strong enough to keep my interest (or rather, the character wasn't distinctive and interesting enough) - in that case, once I'll want to write a new story, I'll look for a new, stronger idea. I won't try to revive something that had already died once.
- it was a bad writing. If I think it's bad today, in a few years I'll be apalled at how horrible it is.

So I don't see any point of keeping junk around.
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Post by moderntimes »

I suppose it's a matter of effort, too. Tossing old clothes that take up closet space is one thing, as you may need the space. My new disc is about 3% full and maybe in 5 years it will be twice that. And deleting an old file takes effort, as keeping it in a "misc" folder takes no added effort -- more work is required for me to delete old files than to keep them.
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Post by Sophia_Buehler »

zeldas_lullaby wrote:Yeah, I get upset when I write something unusable. Not because I wasted time writing it, but because it's a bit demoralizing to have created something with my characters that ultimately feels flat or unauthentic. (Inauthentic?) Makes me think of that one episode of Frasier where the writing is just downright awful. (The episode has Kristen Chenoweth in it, if anyone's wondering which episode.)

I think I intuit it, though--the other day I wrote a scene and I almost wanted to scrap it, but I didn't. Today I clicked "undo" and the deletions reappeared and I was able to use that scene. So that worked out.

-- 16 Jun 2015, 00:07 --

Oh, hey, welcome to the site, Sophia!!
haha thank you! I'm looking forward to using it quite a bit! :)
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