Plots lost and found

pickarooney

I had a half-baked idea over lunch so this might not make any sense, but how and ever...

I think every writer at some stage goes back over what he's written and is forced to cut out something which he likes but which ultimately adds nothing to his story. I don't know about anyone else, but I keep incremental version numbers of my manuscript and none of the cut stuff is lost forever, just... archived.

I sometimes console myself by saying I'll recycle the superfluous characters, extraneous descriptions and parenthetic plot twists but realistically that is not going to happen.

Here's the mad (stupid) bit - what about, instead of letting the dead bits fester, we donate them, swap them or just cut them free to roam the web? Obviously, nobody is going to want to use all of your 7-page treatise on Jozibear's perfectly manicured fingernails or that chapter devoted to the majordomo's third cousin who was hidden under the pizza-deliverer's helmet but maybe, just maybe someone might find a use for 'unnamed hospital orderly with a gammy leg' or 'seventeen ways to say black without saying 'black''.

For example, I've just killed off a Peruvian tour-guide who moonlights as a gigolo and am trying to come up with a character to work behind the bar in a desert resort.

I'm not sure anyone will really understand this (I'm not sure I get it myself to be honest) but if you do, and have anything to donate or need some spare parts, let's see what you have.

af_thefragile

I've actually written pages describing plot summaries and character details for one of my novel and i've barely even started writing the novel. The way I see it is that write as much as you can, put as much detail as you can into every character, plot and situation. Then take it all out and leave just the bare essentials. By doing this you understand the characters and situations better giving them more depth and the extra bits you cut out are like the scaffolding you use to build a monument. Its necessary to ensure the strength of the structure and make sure it doesn't fall apart. But after the structure's complete, the scaffolding has no use.


But I like your idea of making some use of these left out bits. Let them float about freely in the realm of the interwebs to be picked up by some visionary and give it a new life... But I need to first complete finishing the novel as till then I need these bits.

smcgiff

pickarooney wrote: »

I don't know about anyone else, but I keep incremental version numbers of my manuscript and none of the cut stuff is lost forever, just... archived.

Ditto!

Surplus plots etc may not be needed now, but a time may come when you are writing something else and you could use that character or plot. If it's good enough for someone else, perhaps it will be good enough for you at a later date.

pickarooney

I got bored/distracted one day and wrote a chapter about one of the characters getting off her face on peyote. I never really intended to keep it in there, and have just snipped the whole thing out. I both like it and hate it in equal measure, and I doubt it will ever resurface. It's stream of consciousness (I think) and reading it back a few years later I know exactly what it all means but assume it just reads like utter garbage to anyone else.

San Pedro
Noémi's lips chomped anxiously on the butt of a Che cigarette which had been painstakingly disassembled, reassembled and packed tight with blue-tinted bambalacha and its seam soaked in syrupy hash oil. She flexed her long fingers and ground a small piece of gravel under her flip-flop. Her hand went again to the scribbled scrap of graph paper folded in her hip pocket, reassuring herself that this was real. The last bus left at seven. It was now a quarter to eight but somehow everything was riding on her believing it would come. Ten seconds later it did, galumphing and belching around the hairpin bend below, full as a boiled egg. She held a limp arm briefly aloft and let it fall heavily back to her side as the bus went past. A mixture of relief and agony filled her as the crazy dream rolled by, then stopped a few metres further up. Suddenly, incredibly high, she needed to hear it twice to realise it was actually there – a small voice hanging from the saloon-swing doors calling out to her. They could make room.

Helter-swelter shudder-slides round bendy forks in the folksy tumult, cocked hats cackling as lives flash past in a heady cornucopia of deft stitches and so much yellow and pink. Ramble on, rumble on to where the neon streaks die in the extant infraburbs. One man thinking for ten men talking – the weather's nice for the day that's in it. Oil patches on water-stains, some public-transport Picasso's joined the dots in fluffy marker, sky-high on the mingled fumes. Head lolls, thunks on the opaque window. Just in time, a seat's come free, but a skin-and-bones farmer woman is next in line. Gripping fingerstreaks on the all-steel pole she hurls her scarce self onto shredded fake leather – blue like an Aegean postcard. In back, a practised kiss, faces gripped as though death depended on it. Blissful adolescence, youth's last act of defiance. Pretty soon it's Buenas tardes and cheeky twins are taking turns. How old is she and where's her baby? they must be saying – everything sounds like a train set. Pink crystal beads bleed like raindrops through an arthritic fist and He will come again to save us. The ones you hurt the most believe the easiest. Three beats, and multiples of three, the radio says to all join hands. Cumbia my Lord, let's pray for nationalised dentistry. Patricia will be a teacher soon, she says with a frightened laugh. Inglés the most important lesson, should you be so lucky.
- I hope to to teach my businessmen through songword introductions
- Beatles?
- Perhaps?
- Michael Jackson?
- There is no doubt
- Noémi, knowing you
- Ah-ha
Stroke of luck, the town is (little) more than myth, Patricia says, her voice too low for teaching. Stop a hundred steps before the light begins again, she whispers. Sweat dries back in, heart hammers at a stiller pace, whirlpool eyes say things will come right. Pretty soon it's Buenas noches and the niños all know your stop. Hurry, scurry, scramble to the door, the rush begins, a brown sea parted and the plexiglass gate gives with a firm hoorah. A cold cloak, the lapis night unfolds. Right now it's Buena suerte and a melting yellow candle is the world. Faces, voices, unattached, handsome in the half-light, greetings from the dirt-floor where roadkill drums circle more moving voices. A half-dozen, a half-million, sent by fat Rasta, stabbing orange lights in punctuation. Nothing doing but a fat courgette, slow boiling, toil and troubling as you take knife and pare. Hack, whittle and slice while jokes as introductions mark Seth as the sly one, paint Marco as the passionate fool. Caipirinha-voiced João mocks all with an enormous heart, feeding the fat ambiance with wispy tails of Mary-Jane. None too soon it's Buena onda when the shivers come, braille graffiti on frail, unmeaty forearms. Grease and alabaster, sickly Seth drinks flames and greeny smoke. Five more hours till Saint Peter he tells, a handful of quick-stripped nails the sign for downing tools.
She gets two 'cause she's a girl, the rug-man whispers. Wrapped and stapled to the clay, bugs ooze and hover in the dreamspace. Right now it's Buenos sueños, as even the cockerel knows.

Noémi reeled as her stomach poured itself through her rasped throat, dizzy from a violent bout of vomiting. Her tear-blurred vision picked out smoky images of her bent-double fellow pilgrims holding walls and heaving. A dribble of foul green liquid escaped her nostril, yet to take gentle control of her scattered thoughts. A white cat sniffed at the black tureen, near-empty, its ladlefuls of mind-poison dispensed. See you later, he mewled as the band came together, adventure in their palms. Misty morningchill upped its Dresden curtain, a three-parts-water sun thus brought to bear pale golden witness. Already, in the field and on the woody slopes where piglets groinked, shapes formed and mysteries gathered. Noémi shuffled on slipshod ski-feet through a whispering pasture, stalks bobbing under preening beetle-bugs. Here sat Cylloepus, legs a-rubbing, dark mask on, a mess of fractal spirals on his broad back. Black, red, fire in the night, the arbitrary blotches took on Fibonacci features as she counted out.
"I should love to paint you, were you not painted yet" she murmured, cupping him, breathing on his beetly wings, "je te peindrais bien, ne fus-tu déjà peint."
The broken-glass giggles of high boys pulled her ear. Seth had found a chicken's egg, fissured just so, cracked as the copper-oxide sky by cumulonimbi. A salute from private Marcus, public approval on his narcoleptic mush. Here, too, a golden-numbered petal-ring, a violet meander in the scrub. Absorbed, absolved from sins of worry and mistrust, time spun slow webs about them. The faces of the mountain, gnarled gnomes of igneous persuasion, browsed the quinoa and the corn in scattered minifundia of gold and ochre. These wise heads, too, sat softly still in regal lines, rocky jaws hewn at well-considered angles. Hands joined below, a finger-piled lasagne on the moss. Cubic Eméric, a great head fallen from the mountside, cracked his boxy cheeks and spoke of eagles in the copse.

Waltzing in and out of coloured consciousness, soft body clutched to ancient perfumed bark, barefoot in the needlegrass, Noémi watched the pigherd child traipse past as she had watched her earlier, picking pockets in a Quito tram and on that TV show for children. The ruddy bairn had held her rascal tongue that time, keeping secrets from the great stuffed bear, secrets her piggies would not care to share, secrets of a lonely midget soul. Grubs twitched on pungent moss and in their shrunken faces laughter lit, sacred smile lines, a pattern once again repeating – lines, arcs and folds described in the bleak woodsong of a cream-toed bird. Eméric had lost his clobber, stood white-cheeked by a gloopy pond. Bald Seth frog-hopped to his side, hands finding succour in the frosty mud. Sculptures all, these trees were not for toppling nor their birds for plucking nor their flighty squirrels for the chase. And in each drey there grew a face – the solemn brown-locked why-oh-why of Robin.

Starkly lucid, Noémi picked her way carefully between small piles of porcine excrement, a sudden vicious hunger in her loins. Cactus casualties lay flat and groaning, stood blankly staring, reassembling a fragmented world no longer infused with mystic light. The musician-trapper waited with cold rice and beans as they mooched back, sun-struck and shivering, to his smoky hovel, clutching various reminders of a waking dream. White cat yawned and scritched his ear, came to claim his cuddle like a mafia collector. There would be music later, half-remembered hillside tales and travellers' exchanges of a habitual sort – but first the eating. Trapper Walter, trunk-like and with a wise mien, sat stitching cross-legged on the earth, a fox-pelt stretched by his iron fingers wrapping itself ever tighter round a hollowed stump. His dainty wife Alicia, fingers greened from palta-mashing, plucked his rust-red bonnet from his oaken head and buried a kiss in his tousled hair while their two skinny children teased a small dog, tugging at its stumpy tail, swatting it with a yellow newspaper. Forcing down a last mouthful of tomato rice, Noémi hoped for a bus.