Sacrificing a Scene You Like for a Scene You Need

I usually reserve my sacrificial scenes for later in the novel or another ms. Never give up on them! Never surrender! I mean, you know, surrender to Muse at THAT particular time when it doesn’t fit, but not overall. Yes.

You know, I threw out an entire novel and am rewriting from scratch. There’s some absolutely wonderful stuff in the tossed version, and I figure that most of it will never see the light of day. But I also figure that as I continue to write, I’ll become a better writer so I don’t mourn the “lost” prose because I assume I’ll just write better stuff.

I tried to reuse a couple of scenes from the tossed novel in the new one, and while I was able to keep the basic structure of the scenes, I still pretty much had to rewrite them from scratch. Which I find interesting. It was more work to re-work the old stuff to fit with the new than it would have been to just write new scenes.

Anyway, there’s no point in getting attached to our prose. I see all of my writing as provisional these days. I bear in mind always that whatever I think about a scene now, I’ll probably change/delete it at some point.

@ Scott
It’s not so much the prose I’m attached to — though I won’t say I never given into the temptation of throwing a love-fest for my own words. No, it’s the characters, and sometimes the setting or situation I miss. In this case, I had the idea of an all female pirate ship and a good idea of the captain. I like that and hopefully those characters will show up some time.

The novel I’m working on right now is also a full re-write, in theory of a novella I wrote in high school. I’m using the original more as an outline than as text to edit. Each scene so far is completely new at the sentence level. The plot is more fleshed out as well.

@sraach
“We are not retreating, we are advancing in a backwards direction.” *grin*

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Grief! I’m going through something similar right now. I’ve got a bunch of scenes involving the MCs I’m going over – there’s tension in them, gut wrenching emotion and explainations to questions I want answered but they don’t work, at least not all of them and not exactly as they are. What I’ve got to do is take a little from one and a little from another and mush them together (hopefully with more cohesion than mush) and then I’ve got to figure out where to put the finished scene. It’s hard because, while I knew writing the scenes they would have to be changed, the MCs (and I) still experienced them and evolved because of them …

Like Scott, I’ve completely thrown out a book and started from scratch. I lost a lot of great stuff I loved. I’ll never use it again, sadly. It will rot and decay. Oh well.

This is just part of writing, and I have to accept it even though it totally sucks. Even from Cinders I cute some freaking fantastic stuff, but it just didn’t fit right. Really sad. 🙁

From Monarch, I cut all those jungle scenes and thought I’d never use them – but then I put them back in. I did, however, have to pretty much rewrite them, so that hurt, too.

I should make a book of cut scenes.