The Cutting Room Floor

[Mal_Bey]

Just a quick question for my fellow writers: During the course of your writing, how much of your writing ends up just being completely excised? I'm not interested in stuff cut for word choice or other small edits. I am thinking more of the loss of whole paragraphs or scenes that just don't work for one reason or another. I am just writing and I am just finding myself repeatedly cutting big pieces. Twice I restarted because I entered the tale at the wrong point. Then I cut a great character scene. It was a cooking scene that really let the protagonist shine, but didn't move the story along otherwise. I ended up cutting it because it preceded an essential restaurant scene that felt very similar. Now I am looking at another big cut. It is a scene where the adults in my protagonist's life pass on wisdom by answering the same question. Again, it is another character scene, but it is the secondary characters being built out. Unless I can figure out a way to restructure, it is going to get cut because it is overloading, and distracting from the main scene. Added up, I am at 30-40% of my output for this story I have cut. I suspect this is relatively high, but while I was letting the latest problem stew, I thought I would ask others for their experience.

 

[RejectReality]

I cut a lot of stuff. Whole scenes, and even whole chapters. Almost all of it gets saved in a folder along with half-baked ideas that I migrate out of the main folder eventually once they've been taking up space for a few years.

Once in a blue moon, I'll pull one of those out and get a story idea out of it, or work in pieces of it to the original story or a later tale, but I've never actually cut-n-pasted anything.

Most of it is digressions that I'm terribly fond of, but which drag the story down. The rest is usually sex scenes that are too tied to the narrative to remain once I make a change in something else. Everything else gets cut with the backspace key, and is lost to the ether forever.

 

[KeithD]

I go the other way. With each review I tend to add. Cutting is almost nonexistent. The first draft tends to be a stripped-down version, leaving adding of some detail and polishing of content, for later--chugging to the end. I change words in review; I don't cut out much material.

 

[Rustyoznail]

For me, hard to know. I don't plan out the story in detail, if at all. I read over what I've done, tweaking as I go. Sometimes I get a paragraph in and decided I'm heading down the wrong path, but that's about the most I delete.

 

[NotWise]

For me, hard to know. I don't plan out the story in detail, if at all. I read over what I've done, tweaking as I go. Sometimes I get a paragraph in and decided I'm heading down the wrong path, but that's about the most I delete.

It's common for me to lose paragraphs--especially, the last paragraph I write on one day is often cut the next day.

I have, from time-to-time, found that I got diverted into a subplot that didn't work out. In that case I can lose thousands of words. I try to keep those in mind to use in a different story. One came to mind yesterday because I drove the route where the story happened.

 

[SamScribble]

I will occasionally cut a sentence. But that's about it. Like Keith (above), I tend to start lean and add.

 

[Smuttyandfun]

Just a quick question for my fellow writers: During the course of your writing, how much of your writing ends up just being completely excised? I'm not interested in stuff cut for word choice or other small edits. I am thinking more of the loss of whole paragraphs or scenes that just don't work for one reason or another. I am just writing and I am just finding myself repeatedly cutting big pieces. Twice I restarted because I entered the tale at the wrong point. Then I cut a great character scene. It was a cooking scene that really let the protagonist shine, but didn't move the story along otherwise. I ended up cutting it because it preceded an essential restaurant scene that felt very similar. Now I am looking at another big cut. It is a scene where the adults in my protagonist's life pass on wisdom by answering the same question. Again, it is another character scene, but it is the secondary characters being built out. Unless I can figure out a way to restructure, it is going to get cut because it is overloading, and distracting from the main scene. Added up, I am at 30-40% of my output for this story I have cut. I suspect this is relatively high, but while I was letting the latest problem stew, I thought I would ask others for their experience.

Sometimes, if I'm not sure about a scene, or might want to go back to it, I save it as another document, referencing the name of the story so I can find it again. This way you don't delete it, you just set it aside and re-examine it later.

 

[tenyari]

Not so much right away. But if I spend a long time away from an inwork story, when I come back to it I may find myself wanting to rewrite large portions of it that no longer fit with the vision of how I see it.

I have this habit of doing a LOT of 'day in the life' stuff that does nothing to move my plot forward, but heavily advances world building, character, or both. If it's not serving the plot in any way though, I start feeling I need to cut a lot of it out.

The most extreme case of this is a story that currently sits at over 38,000 words and has yet to start it's plot... but my readers will know the name and genealogy of every dust bunny the main character has ever walked past... That one is basically on the 'start over' list.

This problem is heavily tied to why I have so few posted stories here, and why they are all so old...

At some point I need to learn to stop cutting and re-writing and just let them out the door.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Almost nothing gets cut. I fiddle with words, phrases, occasionally a sentence, rarely a paragraph.

My writing is pretty much stream of consciousness. My edit must be mostly in my subconscious, because my first raw draft is pretty much 98% in the final.

I have no idea how I do this, but it's how I've always written. It works for me.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Sometimes, if I'm not sure about a scene, or might want to go back to it, I save it as another document, referencing the name of the story so I can find it again. This way you don't delete it, you just set it aside and re-examine it later.

I agree. Why should one thought for a scene hold more value than another? Because it fits better.

That doesn't devalue the other thought, it just repurposes it. Weigh what you think the scene has and decide if it is worth holding on to for you to possibly use as inspiration for a new story, or as a component of another story.

 

[EarlyMorningLight]

I have no idea how much I cut, because I have a horrible habit of editing as I write. It’s something I’ve actively tried to curtail in my writing because I once got to the point where every sentence had to be perfect before I would move onto the next one, and my writing ground to a halt.

But still, I often find myself in a place where I write three sentences, delete two, write five more, delete three, etc. Maybe I lose some good words, but if it’s not flowing right, I just want to clean the slate and keep my flow instead of stopping to copy the discarded words onto another file.

I’m proud of myself today, though. I’m about 1/4-1/3 through the draft of a new story and I’ve realized that I either need to change the year where the story is set or change the age of one of the character, but I’m pushing through to finish a draft instead of going back to the beginning and reworking the incongruent bits from scratch.

 

[Blind_Justice]

Happens all the time. Despite a good outline, sometimes my story grabs an idea and runs with it only to end up in a place where I don't want it. Sometimes its the wrong tone in dialogue, sometimes a whole scene. My biggest rewrite was the beginning of "Mud&Magic". It started out as about 20,000 words in first person POV, but I was so eager to get to the good parts, it read very breathless and hectic, without space to give the characters time to make an impact on the reader. My test readers told me in no uncertain terms how bad it was and I scrapped the whole thing, changed it to third person and throttled the pace. It freaking hurt to drop such a big lump of work, but going by the generally good reviews, it was the right move. And in the grand scheme of things, compared to the 340,000 words the whole thing is now, 20k isn't that much...

 

[XerXesXu]

At the end of one novel, I cut chapters 2 and 3 and swapped 1 and 4, moving the opening to Ch 4, now 1. I reduced the opening from 900+ words to 19 and introduced the antagonist in Ch 1 and the protagonist in Ch 2. It read far better.

I've cut 9 (16%) words from the above post, about the shrinkage I’d expect to achieve in narration.

 

[shakna]

About 20k words a week? I cut whole chapters (well, save them, but cut them from the final) on a fairly regular basis. That doesn't include the paragraphs that I kill for being just plain terrible, just the stuff that's good, but isn't quite working. It's rare that anything I cut and save ever gets reused, but the few times I've deleted stuff, I've regretted it.

As an example, I've got a piece called "Toofy", that is now complete at 24 chapters and 225,500 words, or thereabouts. I've got four saved cut chapters, that add up to roughly 60,000 words (excluding commentary information).

 

[gunhilltrain]

Sometimes, if I'm not sure about a scene, or might want to go back to it, I save it as another document, referencing the name of the story so I can find it again. This way you don't delete it, you just set it aside and re-examine it later.

It's a good idea to save old stuff. Now I have to remember if I did that for something I just cut! It became an info dump - it was set on a Circle Line boat going around Manhattan. I only kept one paragraph describing the World Trade Center construction in 1972. Everything else just went - and it was a lot - until the boat emerges from the Harlem River into the Hudson (fourteen miles later) and I got to the key conversation I wanted to present.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I have, when characters seem to take over the story and go off the rails in a completely different direction. I cut it and save it hoping maybe it might spark a different kind of story about the same characters. So far, nada.

 

[MrPixel]

...characters seem to take over the story and go off the rails in a completely different direction. ...

This is my quandary at the moment. I wrote two chapters to occur "at a later date" and whaddayaknow, the preceding development is going to induce big changes in material I thought was settled.

 

[Duleigh]

I let my characters lead me down a rabbit hole far too often. I look at my original outline and wonder "How did it all go so wrong?" and I find myself cutting more from the outline than from the story. Fortunately, my characters have better sense than I do, or maybe they're hamming it up for the readers.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

The rough draft of my latest published story was 65k words. Final draft just over 30k. I've also added and cut many scenes during the editing iterations.

I also keep a file of cut work which I will revisit from time to time. I'll often find scenes to repurpose.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I don't cut much if at all.

I brainstorm everything first. I never just sit and start typing. Brainstorming (my kind of brainstorming anyways) filters out pretty much anything that doesn't work. I'll start with a scene or two usually with a character that I feel strongly about. Then I go back to the brain (go for a walk, lie awake in bed) and work out some sort of plot. Once I have that, I get back to the computer and make plot notes - a plot skeleton if you will. Then I start fleshing out all those bones, almost never chronologically, jump around to whichever scene next inspires me most. This is actually a bit of a dichotomy in me as I'm not a messy-pallet kind of person. I'd rather stay in one groove, but if one scene is dragging to a halt and another scene is calling then I will move there instead and not force things. Often some of the details that I flesh in lead to adding another bone or two to the plot, which may mean editing some of the previously written scenes (which also means that I would never EVER publish a story one chapter at a time), but I always seem to add.

As far as line-by-line edits, I'm constantly doing that, editing the last nine or last paragraph that I just wrote for grammar, flow, structure, pronoun mixing, word choice, etc.

 

[Mal_Bey]

Thank you all for your replies. While I figured I was comfortably in the middle ground, I have to admit the thought of working the way some of you profess absolutely terrifying. Preparing to the point of being within a few sentences of the final product is just mind blowing. But the other extreme is equally cortex shattering. How do you choose half the words to go away without an Infinity Gauntlet?

I guess it is an example of looking to see how the sausage gets made. But being in the sausage making business myself now, I wanted to ask.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

How do you choose half the words to go away without an Infinity Gauntlet?

Easy, half the words I write are nonsense

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

Under a different moniker, I have flogged a self-pubbed novel by bringing text marketing into the 21st century...just barely, to about 2003. By then, DVDs of movies were stuffed with extras, like interviews and alternate endings. For my book, I offer deleted scenes! This makes direct use of stuff that I had to discard from the final text.

Happy are we who live in the era of captured keystrokes. We can save-as and do great violence to the new version, knowing that the old one is unscathed, and perhaps can be revisited later. That can be an uncomfortable conversation (the old version saying, "Oh, now you come crawling back to me?"), but you can mumble about how much you've learned, and now you're a better person.

The brain that has guided me into my eighth decade of life has its own ideas about how to write a story. Sometimes it needs several exertions to realize what a story is truly about, and who the characters really are. Once I get a realization like that, I can no longer see the earlier approach as valid. So the rewrite generally doesn't bother me, and I know that Old Version will be there for me. It's not like it can move on to some other writer. Callous, aren't I?

 

[TheRedChamber]

I been watching a lot of writing advice videos recently and one of them (I forget which) made the point that, after the first draft is complete, pantser writers often need to go back and edit the plot to remove and rework scenes that aren't advancing the plot or characters, whereas planner writers often don't need to alter the plot but need to go and strengthen character and place descriptions.

That's probably true for me, and, reading this thread, maybe true for other planner writers (though seemingly not all). For most stories there are scenes I have in my head that get dropped before I write the first word, and those scenes are often quite developed in my imagination - I had one recently where a female MC visited doctor for a pregancy consultation that would have been a good character moment, but occurred after where I eventually felt the natural end point of the story was.

On the other hand, on multiple occassions, I've had to go back and add in a particular character trait or backstory to a story because it made a weaker character stronger. This usually includes adding paragraphs, but it can also involve completely rewriting paragraphs to accomodate the change - though these aren't so much cut as they are altered beyond recognition.

That said, I'm probably going to drop entirely a prologue I wrote recently for a current project as it's a framing device that doesn't work and is largely redundant to the plot. I'm also probably going to start the first chapter again changing first person perspective into close third. In this case though, I was aware as I was writing it that it was an experiment and I wanted to see what it looked like on the page even though I knew there was a good chance it wouldn't be used. Thinking about it, rewrites often happen as a result of me not being happy with the perspective or POV, not accidentally both things that are outside the scope of my perfectly polished plots.

 

[KeithD]

Once the writing starts and in my consciousness I'm sure I'm a pantser writer. I think I can only make that work because my muse, which operates in secret in my mind/muse, must be a planner writer, as what goes down in the computer from the get go is substantially the same (with some added detail work) as the finished work. While I am writing I feel like a free spirit, which is why a write more fiction now than nonfiction.