Free copy and breakfast.
My love of leftovers is not just about having chicken curry for breakfast. I love leftover paragraphs and chapters too.
It often happens in the course of pulling a book together that whole scenes get orphaned or chapters just don’t work out, but they never end up in the trash. I have a file in each of my Scrivener projects for these failures, because you never know when you’re going to be able to bring them back to life.
I was getting towards the end of my writing day yesterday—although really it was a plotting day, because I’m beating out the story arcs for World War 3.4—and I remembered I had a whole bunch of splodey chapters I’d written previously that I hadn’t used, some of them going back 10 or 15 years. It took me a couple of minutes to find them, but they were still there.
A lot of it was unusable, but there were a couple of bits and pieces here and there that I was able to pull out and insert into the storyboard for the next book. We’ll see what happens when I actually sit down to edit them properly. Maybe they failed the first time for a very good reason, but I do love getting free copy… almost as much as I love chicken curry for breakfast.
You had me at chicken curry for breakfast.
I do this thing where I pull out stuff I wrote 10-15 years ago and read it. And quietly put it away. It annoys me, because I was going through some shit then after a break up and my emotional writing was so much better. I guess you really do need to suffer for the art, or something. Also, I think I have matured as a writer a bit, or at least as a human, as a lot of my characters were very angry men back then, and now, I am more likely to just roll a dice to determine someone's gender if it is at all prescient to the story.
What I write and how I write has changed as well. I used to write about events, and people. Now I write about people, in events.