Great scenes you've had to cut

I once cut this really great scene where one of my MCs got this call from a social worker, wanting to know if he was okay...this particular MC had been abused for about fifteen years, and was basically like, "You're calling me NOW?" He kept hanging up on her.

It was cool, but didn't end up working. Like your scene, Jo, it was too much focus on a too minor character.

I'm still so new to this that I'm always writing scenes that are utterly pointless, but so cool, . I'm always stunned to discover I'm not the genius I thought I was, it's gutting.

Most of the scenes I cut, I really never liked all that much. I did cut one scene where two of my MCs are playing a duet on the piano. I replaced it with a waltz... Yes, I know it's corny. No reason to point and laugh.

I had Satan himself as a 30-foot-tall version of my bad guys, spouting twisted Bible quotes at them as they lapped it up, and then morphing into my MC's dead husband and 2 freaky bad guys who'd tried to kill her--as she slowly died, nailed to a cross.

Actually, the scene got better, IMO: No supernatural anything, one of the bad guys kissed her as she hung bleeding, and then they all drank her blood.

callalily61 said:

I had Satan himself as a 30-foot-tall version of my bad guys, spouting twisted Bible quotes at them as they lapped it up, and then morphing into my MC's dead husband and 2 freaky bad guys who'd tried to kill her--as she slowly died, nailed to a cross.

Actually, the scene got better, IMO: No supernatural anything, one of the bad guys kissed her as she hung bleeding, and then they all drank her blood.

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Nice!

I had to lose a sequence in Stargazer that was a really nice conversation between the MC and her mother -- we got a lot of the mother's backstory through that. Although it was interesting, and not unrelated to the plot, it wasn't necessary, and my word count was getting high, so -- snip, snip.

Throwing out words is painful. Words are hard enough to come by; cutting them is difficult for any writer. This past weekend, my co-writer and I decided to dump over 10k words in our WIP because, after a week of floundering around we realized that we were trying to force something into the story that just would not fit. The writing was fine, the scene was fine, the action and dialog were fine, but the words were written for our benefit, not the reader. Sometimes, you've just got to face the fact that no matter how much you want it to work, it won't. Take out the hatchet, hack off the dead limbs, and move on. Good luck.

I had a great prologue, which I loved (and still do). It's up on my blog somewhere in the archives. Of course, it's from the novel under the bed, so it lives on in the blogosphere, since it won't be published. ::cough:: Jan 2 07 ::cough, cough::

Oh, I got entire DRAFTS I had to cut...but the memorable scenes I let go? One very sweet bedtime story routine thing between father and daughter...interrupted by the howling of wolves.

A poignant revelation of the hardships the mysterious main character's been through, to a flabbergasted viewpoint character, that made me cry, but was ultimately too melodramatic...

...about a hundred of those type scenes....

A boy drawing the myth of Icarus and the wings of wax on the walls of his bedroom with charcoal, wishing he could fly away, even if it meant drowning in the sea...


But, even though all of them had to go, they were steppingstones on the path to better writing. Now I don't write so many I have to cut in the end!

Scenes

I don't cut scenes I really love. If I really love them, I figure readers may really love them, as well.

If an editor really, really wants to cut them, I let her, but they usually do not.

I had one I really loved in my second draft. My MC got drunk and said some hilarious things. The setting was probably one of the most vivid I've ever written. Sadly, my second draft climaxed too early and the chapter including that scene got axed in draft three.

I would have moved that scene to an earlier spot, but it didn't quite fit anywhere.

My murdered darlings file is over 10,000 words; that's a little more than 10% of my MS length.

Stonehenge figures in my last novel, The First Vial, and I'd written an elaborate scenario for how the stones came to be brought to the site, positioned and used. The account didn't move forward the story so it had to go.
Linnea

There was a piece I sent to SYW that was almost all tell, and then I split it up into three different full show scenes, including a love scene that was touching in a strange way. I created four extra characters to carry that all the way through, all of whom will be appearing in the rest of the book. I wrote scenes from the viewpoint of the secondary main character early on in the book, which were quite sarcastic and used a depth of language and word play that my main character would not use.

I had to whack all of that due to plot constraints.

Not even all the way through the book either.

But it does inform my current writing and plotting and character development.

I recently rewrote the second half of a book, changing the plot considerably (for the better), and in the process I had to jettison some scenes I really liked. I saved them in another file so I wouldn't feel like I'd lost them forever. In fact, I've got a big file named "cut bits" full of odds and ends of junk that I'll never look at again. It makes me feel better, though.

I have a sickness--I write everything down, whole chapters I know I will end up cutting. My latest project's first draft was 100K words longer than the final draft, and I mourn every one of those lovely scenes that were born only to die in obscurity. I wish there were a more subtle crying smilie. Just a little delicate sniff into my hanky.

Saanen said:

I saved them in another file so I wouldn't feel like I'd lost them forever. In fact, I've got a big file named "cut bits" full of odds and ends of junk that I'll never look at again. It makes me feel better, though.

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Ha! Saanen, I have those files, too. I call them "salvage" files.

My last blog entry was about four beloved scenes I cut from my latest. Doing so is tough, but when the novel benefits, I can't complain. Too much.

i had to cut all the love scenes from my novel because i was not writing erotica. My sister made me save them in a separate file. Just for her. lol

I wrote a truly inspired sex scene when I started my 2nd WIP that I knew I might never get to use, mostly because I hadn't even finished the outline at that point. Aaaaaand - I was right. There was almost a place for it about 20K words back, but it just didn't fit by the time I got there.

Lesson learned. The outline always gets done first now.

Here's one of my typical movie/screenplay-related butt-insky posts.



In the original Star Wars from 1977, there was a scene that was completely shot (with Harrison Ford and a very human-looking British actor) and set aside in the can and this scene never saw the light of day for almost 20 whole years (it is now found in DVD extras and in the EE). In that scene, Han Solo had a prolonged conversation with Jabba the Hutt while the two of them stood together in the flight hanger just beside Han Solo's ship the Millenium Falcon. In that conversation, Jabba told Han he wanted his money, and Han assured Jabba he would get it to him. Jabba also chided Han for killing Greedo earlier in the cantina.

The scene was cut from the 1977 version of the film for many reasons, the most important being that the movie was already running very long and something had to go. One of the rules of thumb for determining which scenes to cut and which to keep (at least in cinema) is that if a scene doesn't have either the main protag, or the main antag, then it needs to go. Han Solo was NOT the main protag, just a buddy/sidekick. And Jabba was NOT the main antag, just a complication to Han's private life. While getting to know Han a little more was certainly a tempting prospect, Jabba had nothing to do with either Luke or Darth Vader. So the scene was an obvious candidate for the cutting room floor. Thus we never got to see Jabba until he was introduced to us as a giant Frank Oz creation from the Muppet Workshop in the third film called "Star Wars, Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi."

Meanwhile, George Lucas was smart enough to hang on to the footage all those years, so when really advanced CGI became possible in the late 1990's, he redid that scene that had been shot all the way back in 1976 and included a CGI version of the Jabba we originaly saw as a giant Muppet back in the mid-1980's.



The moral of the story: even if you cut it, hang on to it anyway! It may come in handy later.

My folder is called Spare Parts. The cut scenes and half-written short stories are in there, waiting to be cannibalized whenever necessary.

I hate cutting scenes I love too, but these were taking the story in the wrong direction.

I have hundreds. Sometimes I don't love the scenes as much as I first thought upon a second reading, sometimes the scenes don't work within the overall fabric of the novel, sometimes the scenes are too extemporaneous.

My Word is like a graveyard.

I need to cut my whole first chapter of my first novel and start fresh. I know it was my problem when agents looked at it. I've set it aside for a couple of months now and worked on two other projects. Hopefully after a little longer I will be able to attack it once again with fresh eyes. At this point I feel sad knowing I still like the original beginning, but it caused too much controversy in several agents opinions to be printed. Once the feeling hits me again to deal with it, I'll pick it back up and rework it.