2/9/2024
Cutting Your Favorite Scene
This is number ninety-eight in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“ARE YOU STUPID?” she asked the cabinet nominee fiercely. Then, struck by contrition, she whispered, “I’m sorry. That was brutal, rude, and unkind. I shouldn’t have said it. You must get tired of people always asking that.”
I absolutely love this scene! And I have yet to use it in a story, though I’ve tried some variation or another several times. It’s clever, biting, witty… and wholly borrowed from an anime I once saw. I keep cutting it, even though it is one of my favorite lines of all time.
That’s what happens when I start rewriting and using my head instead of my heart. I have to ask if this is right for what I want to accomplish in the story. I could write another book with the scenes I’ve cut.
Sadly, it wouldn’t be a very good book.
In 1979, I started writing A Touch of Magic. I took my finished 120-page manuscript to another writer to read and he set it aside in about an hour. “Wow!” he said. “That’s really freeze-dried.” His assessment was that if I just added a little hot water to the story, it would be a whole novel.
I walked home, about two and a half miles in Minneapolis, thinking about what was going to happen in this story and how I could add some hot water. At a traffic light, a voice surprised me by saying, “If you’d just be quiet for a minute, I could tell you what it was like.” I almost stepped off the curb with the feeling of how close the voice was, only to see no one near me.
It was the first time a character talked to me. “Everything that exists has being only because someone has remembered it,” said J. Wesley Allen in my head. “Imagine all the things that have never existed because no one has remembered them. Yet.”
I’ve used that often as an example of a character becoming real enough for me to hear his voice in my head. But what it really resulted in was the prequel volume, Behind the Ivory Veil.
It was also the realization that writing the first draft was the easy part. My 120-page first draft flowed from my heart, just after the dissolution of my first marriage. I rewrote Behind the Ivory Veil thirteen times over the next ten years, then put it aside until after I’d published Ritual Reality in 2013. Then, like I’d done years before, I went back to Behind the Ivory Veil and rewrote it three more times before it was ready for editing and publishing in 2017. It took three more years before I was ready to finally edit and release A Touch of Magic, the story I thought I had written in 1979.
If you think I didn’t cut some of my favorite scenes in that process, you are sadly mistaken. I literally cut up the manuscript and pasted it back together in the days before computers. I pasted sections of the manuscript onto a yellow legal pad and wrote the new material between. Many of those cut-up portions of the manuscript never got pasted onto the yellow pad.
The entire Props Master series is available as either a collection or individual eBooks at Bookapy.
The ultimate cut. When I moved from a 2800 sq ft house to my 140 sq ft trailer, I had to reduce my life to less than 750 pounds. All those old drafts as well as countless others were on paper, and I recycled them all! This, in fact, is the only digital photo I can find of the carnage which was ultimately several times the size of what was on the floor here.
How does that relate to my current work in progress? As far as the timeline is concerned, after six chapters of Forever Yours, I’m at about the same place as I was in the first draft of “Sisyphus.” But I estimate that over fifty percent of the content is new. That means, of course, that I’ve cut half of what I originally wrote.
My favorite bits?
My original idea was to parallel the Sisyphus myth with occasional appearances by Greek gods, especially Aphrodite, the goddess of love. That in itself should inspire some pretty good love scenes between the goddess and my hero.
I decided the real story wasn’t the parallel with Sisyphus, but was the success story of a character and group working from high school forward to create a unique use and development of AI. The story really had nothing to do with Sisyphus.
Damn!
I really love working from myths to modern stories. The entire Props Master series, mentioned above, was based on creating a myth that would fit seamlessly with the existing body of Greek mythology. I wrote an entire book of short works based on the myth of Pygmalion Revisited.
Bob’s Memoir is all about a demon named Bob who has lived for 4,000 years, and exposes his relationship to the gods of Greece, Mesopotamia, Israel, India, Indonesia, and China. Oh, with a stop at Easter Island, the Aztecs, and the Incas. I love working with mythology for my novels.
And I cut all that from my rewrite of Forever Yours.
Some of the most notable and enjoyable parts I had to eliminate were the interaction with Greek gods, including the sexual dynamic of the goddess Aphrodite. I loved that stuff.
There was a time in my life when I referred to this whole process as ‘killing your babies,’ but really that’s a gruesome image and there isn’t anything I write that is equivalent of a baby. When you put it in that perspective, cutting favorite bits and pieces of a story isn’t so terrible.
It’s just work.
What is the powerful and exciting bit of action that will replace the fun parts of Forever Yours? Maybe Henry plays golf. People like sports action, right? Especially if he becomes involved with a woman on the golf team. Or someone. For a while.
Do you have any idea how much time it takes to be involved in a sport when one is trying to study computer science and artificial intelligence? If you find someone who excelled in college in a difficult field like computer science or pre-med, it is likely that person had little or no social life.
This is what I mean by doing the hard work. My heart knows the critical points of the story, but they take place over a period of ten years. I really can’t spend more than a couple of chapters on college life. There’s a world to conquer. Or at least change. Or maybe influence.
On an unrelated note, I have launched a project that will affect no one but myself. Next week, “Vanity, Thy Name is Author.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
