What's The Best Idea You've Ever Removed From Your Manuscript?

[Infinimata]

My current WIP went through a drastic and brutal 2nd draft revision (well, more like draft 1 1/2... long story), where I ended up axing something like 60% of the text. Many good things got sliced out of that -- there were a few scenes of interaction between characters that ended up not making the cut, and they were magnificent embodiments of the conflicts in the story at both large and small scale. But a fair amount of the cast also got axed in the name of making the story more direct and manageable, and those sequences fell under the hatchet along with them. I'm not shedding any tears; I know full well those would have been lovely moments unto themselves, but they would have had no place in the new design.

I find that once you cut this stuff and move on, you think less about how good it was by itself, and more about how you made the rest of the work better by excising it.

 

[dickson]

I wrote a longish short story in response to a submission call for steampunk stories involving airships. My story ended up as an alt-history tale in which the first trip to the moon occurs in 1869. Several rounds of SFF SYW helped me pound it into pretty good shape, I like to think.

Imagine my chagrin at learning the magazine that announced the submission call abruptly ceased publication. With a near-complete story in hand, I started seeking other places to submit it. Almost all of them had a word limit for short stories much smaller than what I had. So, I cut out almost everything about airships, and ended up with a shorter story about Victorian moonshots, which I’ve sold to Interzone, print edition. Due to hit the streets in December, I believe.

That has left me with a quantity of reasonably polished draft concerned with airships. My next project is to flesh that out into a second story, in the same setting, with some of the same characters.

I’m looking forward to it. A scene I had to cut involves a flaming row between mother and daughter over daughter’s investments in airship firms. Portraying conflict is something I struggle with, but I really liked how that scene turned out.

 

[DarkWriter223]

To be honest I removed a short story idea (which was already written) and decided to write the entire 3,000 word piece all over again.

 

[Maryn]

Sometimes starting over is exactly the approach a story needs.

Maryn, who's done it

 

[Evan W]

The biggest thing on the cutting room floor for my current book is its depressing setting. In times past, the story took place around the last known star, as all the rest had either died out or redshifted so far away as to make them invisible to the eye and impossible to reach. The world's sky was dim in the day, pitch black at night, and colder by the year; the last habitable biosphere, slowly succumbing to entropy. It was dark, depressing, and all about the impermanence of life and legacy, and how the mortality of everything sucks big hog. It was edgy, and I was extremely depressed, and I loved it to bits.

It killed me a little to shelve it, but honestly I didn't (and still don't imo) have the writing chops to do it justice for how much it affected me.

What the book ended up being is incredibly different in theme and setting than it was when I first started drafting it, to the point where it's nearly unrecognizable. I love what it turned into, but I think about my old setting a lot... one day, I'm gonna dredge it up.

 

[Evan W]

I wrote a longish short story in response to a submission call for steampunk stories involving airships. My story ended up as an alt-history tale in which the first trip to the moon occurs in 1869. Several rounds of SFF SYW helped me pound it into pretty good shape, I like to think.

Imagine my chagrin at learning the magazine that announced the submission call abruptly ceased publication. With a near-complete story in hand, I started seeking other places to submit it. Almost all of them had a word limit for short stories much smaller than what I had. So, I cut out almost everything about airships, and ended up with a shorter story about Victorian moonshots, which I’ve sold to Interzone, print edition. Due to hit the streets in December, I believe.

That has left me with a quantity of reasonably polished draft concerned with airships. My next project is to flesh that out into a second story, in the same setting, with some of the same characters.

I’m looking forward to it. A scene I had to cut involves a flaming row between mother and daughter over daughter’s investments in airship firms. Portraying conflict is something I struggle with, but I really liked how that scene turned out.

Ah, the best part of cutting stuff out: repurposing! It sucks to hear that the magazine left you hanging, but it's very cool that you managed to make the best of the work you'd done. I'll be keeping an eye out for that December Interzone