Friday, April 17, 2015

O is for Out takes

Sometimes at the end of movies, during the credits, scenes that were cut out of the movie are shown.  Often it's scenes where the actors made a mistake, or couldn't get through the scene without laughing, but occasionally it's a scene that got left on the cutting room floor.

On DVDs, often the 'extras' include out takes or deleted scenes, sometimes even whole characters that didn't make it into the finished film (I'm working on a film at the moment where a character has disappeared completely between the first cut I saw and now, and there is another one who has been in and out of the film more often than I can count).

Books are the same.  I have whole folders of deleted scenes.  I have characters who have gone from being boys to girls or been written out of the story all together.  In my first draft of An Unstill Life, Livvie and Jules had an older brother, and several of the things that ended up being Livvie's experiences were initially his.

I managed to recycle this character, with a few tweaks, for my next book, and often scenes I cut out are able to be used somewhere else, in another story.  But I think there are still a lot of word graveyards lurking in the depths of my hard drives.

Do you re-use your outtakes or let them lie where they fall?

3 comments:

  1. I don't usually reuse my cuts. I create things with a specific use in mind and if it ends up not being needed, it gets lifted. I suppose an old character might be recycled in my head and turned into a new one in another story, though.

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  2. I've been known to reuse out-takes. I have a lot of unfinished fiction lying around on hard drives and sometimes I recycle plots or characters into something else. It can be fun to breathe new life into something almost forgotten :)
    Tasha
    Tasha's Thinkings | Wittegen Press | FB3X (AC)

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  3. I have what I call a 'snippet bag' where all sorts of tidbits land... for another day or project.

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