You know what that picture represents?
Brilliance.
Now, I’ve never been inside a modern cookie factory but work with me here… The mother product of the above is a very thin and crispy full-size chocolate chip cookie. And any cook can tell you what happens when you make thin and crispy cookies: you get lots and lots of thin and crispy fragments.
Bummer. Someone’s got to clean that up. In a home kitchen, of course, there’s never any trouble getting rid of the bits and bites, but in an industrial setting, it’s probably a nuisance.
But then someone thought… “Wait a minute… we could, you know, package these. They look like miniature cookies and even the blobs are sorta cute. And some of our customers… maybe they feel guilty eating several of our full size cookies, maybe they’d prefer a less sinful spontaneous indulgence. Best of all, maybe if we hang these on the candy racks at check-out, we’ll successfully introduce our main product to new buyers.”
And they’re not wrong about any of that. It’s simultaneously a new/innovative product, a niche offering for existing customers, and an temptation for potential customers. I wouldn’t be surprised if it even reduced a cost inherent to their factory production by converting wastage into a revenue-producing item.
Why do you care? Because we authors also generate wastage in our product factory. It’s one thing to deliberately set out to write a short story as a come-on temptation for new readers. It’s something else to take things that aren’t working that you’re about to excise from your current work anyway and just throw them away.
The next time you sigh and condemn something, look at it with a fresh eye before just tossing it into the bit bucket. Maybe if you change the names and a bit of the context it can operate as the core of something smaller and independent. Turn your leftovers into samplers. Can’t hurt to throw out more offerings for potential readers, to tempt their appetites.
Have you recycled things like this yourself? Is it a regular part of your toolbox, or an occasional entertainment, or just a distraction?
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “Not just samples, but leftovers”
I’ve done the thing where I cook too much, and then I’ve offered that. I finished my Martha’s Sons series and had a strong need to write three epilogues. Really, only one was worthy of being included in the book proper. But for people who want even more, I offer them as “aftermaths” with a newsletter signup. My newsletter is growing, slowly but surely.
I don’t know that I’d want to offer outtakes. It could confuse the canon, particularly one bit that caused me to be stuck because it was so wrong.
Maybe as a kind of insider thing?
I know that anime artists often have “here are the characters, but drawn as if the fantasy series guys are in down town Tokyo, modern setting” type art.
The “must have x amount of different stuff to be a different edition” type requirements might use it, too.
Yes, confusing folks is a risk– but the appeal of “get this secret information! ” is strong.
Absolutely!
I had an idea for my characters being in a setting telling ghost stories, and Jason’s reply when challenged to tell one….
Well, it ended up being an (amended for tech levels!) retelling of a particular ghost filksong. I don’t think I could put it in a book for sale, even after I polish it up (extremely rough draft ATM). But as a ficlet to put up on, say, AO3 with “here’s a glimpse of a storyworld I’m doing”? Might work!
Waking the Dreamlost had a prologue of a couple of thousand words which was up front about a lot of things we learn relatively gradually over the course of the story. I’ve put it out there as a freebie a couple of times, I’d have to doublecheck my onboarding system in mailchimp to make sure it’s still a thing. And Loving a Deathseer was written significantly before the other books in the same series, with a steampunk-ish tech level enhanced with seeing stones, so when I was editing it, I put up on my blog the original version of a scene where this was most obvious. I suppose I should put up what I wrote of the opening of Star Master Book 3, before I decided I didn’t really have enough plot for a book three.
Alot of times, though, the stuff in my “cut bits” file in Scrivener gets reused elsewhere in the same novel, or expanded.
Back in the day, when my supply of words was greater than the demand for my books, after each book came out I generally wrote an article or two about some topic that intrigued me while researching the book, but which was peripheral to the subject of the book and could not be included.
Things like an article listing Native American regiments raised in the American Civil War or why a prominent Marine Corps fighter ace got shot down strafing a lighthouse in New Ireland. (Long story short – there was a radar station at the lighthouse, but when he got shot down strafing it radar was still secret, so the official announcement only mentioned the lighthouse.)
Nowadays, between a day job and a full load of books, I lack the time to do that. It was fun, though and a good way to make a little money recycling my research.
In the fanfic thing, one of the short stories initially started with a conversation over breakfast. It was a nice domestic scene, the characters were happy, and it just didn’t move the story. So I pulled it, put it in the scrap bucket and started that story way after that spot.
Then I turned around and ended up using basically the same starting scene in the next short story, but instead of them talking, one of them just doesn’t show up.
Instead of a fairly slow domestic scene, you get the feel of what it would have been, and the slow creeping dread that something has happened to their SO.
I like that. Think I’ll steal it. 🙂
May it serve you well.
(Spell check keeps wanting to change serve to swerve…)
Bowing in thanks (and ducking to avoid the swerve.)
Oh yeah. All the time, since I started on Substack. Because I write a LOT of backstory and stuff that doesn’t get used. So far, I’ve only actually changed things around enough to make it a totally different story once. I guess it almost works like fanfic of my own fic. Out-takes, alternate versions, slice of life. That way, I have stuff to post at least weekly.
I also, from time to time, post stuff related to my research.
I’ve cut chunks out and used them in different stories. I’ve also taken an idea from a removed bit and used that in a different series. I’ve got a scene that I’m pretty sure I can’t use in the next book, but might work in the one that follows. (I don’t think one of the four characters can keep his mouth shut, because he has very divided loyalties. And the other three know and respect that.)
Never delete.
I’ll usually stick “doesn’t work”and “doesn’t fit” things down at the end of the working file and look at them later to see if they’re useful as a bonus scene or to inspire a new story. Or just add then to the “Ash Can” file. Bound to be good for something, sometime.
Yeah, I have a “cut bits” file buried in the bowels of any given scrivener project. I don’t always remember to move stuff there when I remove it, but if I thought it was a neat turn of phrase or a good bit of dialogue, usually it gets there, and sometimes it finds a better home.