Skip to content
{ 2008 12 28 }

do not discard what you create

I learned the hard way to keep ‘unused scenes’, bits of dialogue or descriptions, clips, and phrases, etc, of my writing. Now I have a folder on the hard drive named ‘unused’. It’s full of documents and subfolders full of documents. I learned these things can be reworked, remolded, edited, and used elsewhere. In writing, not much is ever truly ‘wasted’.

Google+Google BookmarksGoogle ReaderGoogle GmailTumblrFacebookRead It LaterEmailWordPressShare
Posted by Mari on Sunday, December 28, 2008, at 11:59 am. Filed under writing. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

{ 2 } Comments

  1. Jeremy D Brooks | January 2, 2009 at 9:11 am | Permalink

    I started doing that as well…I call them orphan blurbs. One file is full of platitudes that popped into my head from time to time, and a year or so later I wrote a story where a character needed to sound like an armchair philosopher and lo, I had several pages of B.S. on which he could chew. I used to write them into the MS that they were originally intended for, and make them red and push them to the end for later use, but that got too messy–so now I put them in separate documents.

    When you're a hungry writer, you pick the bones clean…

  2. Mari | January 3, 2009 at 8:53 am | Permalink

    One file is full of platitudes that popped into my head from time to time I have a file full of one-liners, quotes, thoughts, and such, myself – with attributes for the ones which have/need them. I dip into this file quite often. Sometimes it's fun to read just for a giggle or an bit of inspiration.

    When you’re a hungry writer, you pick the bones clean… Amen to that.

    Thanks for dropping by! :)