More Rejects
April 15, 2012
One of life's more annoying facts is that it's usually the phrase/sentence/paragraph that you're most pleased with that you end up having to cut from your final draft. In fact, always be suspicious of your finest lines. What makes them memorable is usually that they are different from the rest of the piece and indicate a change of style that creates an (often inappropriate) jolt. They're often descriptive so they could slow down the pace as well. Hardening your heart and killing your 'babies' (metaphorically of course) is all part of being professional.
You don't have to let your cherished words go to waste, however. Singly, they could give you ideas for characters or settings. If you put them on index cards so that you can shuffle them around easily you might find some group together to form the basis of a new work. Even those that stubbornly refuse to fit in anywhere else could find a home on Twitter with a little polishing, such as this extract from a scene I had to cut from the sequel to Discord's Child, which I'm currently working on:
"The laundry was full of the slap and slosh of wet cloth being pounded into giving up its dirt. She hid in swirls of steam."
In the novel, it was self-indulgent, but as a tweet, hopefully the prose is a lighter shade of purple.
You don't have to let your cherished words go to waste, however. Singly, they could give you ideas for characters or settings. If you put them on index cards so that you can shuffle them around easily you might find some group together to form the basis of a new work. Even those that stubbornly refuse to fit in anywhere else could find a home on Twitter with a little polishing, such as this extract from a scene I had to cut from the sequel to Discord's Child, which I'm currently working on:
"The laundry was full of the slap and slosh of wet cloth being pounded into giving up its dirt. She hid in swirls of steam."
In the novel, it was self-indulgent, but as a tweet, hopefully the prose is a lighter shade of purple.
Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Inspiration
