Intentional Outtakes

[Annette Dashofy]

(Cross posted to Writing, etc.)

I spent several hours yesterday writing stuff that no one will ever read.

Considering that I have two manuscripts collecting rejection slips in New York it could be argued that I spend ALL my time writing stuff that no one will ever read, but I don’t want to go there.

Let me put it differently. Even my critique groups and first readers won’t read the pages I wrote yesterday. They’re for my eyes only.

Monday and Tuesday, I worked on Chapters One and Two and reached the point where the body has been discovered. So now I need to know what exactly my detectives find. What condition is the body in? Why is it found where it is? What evidence is on and around the body?

The only way I can know that is to write the murder scene. It’s a scene that happens OFF camera. I know who committed the murder and why, but I didn’t know the circumstances. After three hours of writing about the events leading up to the murder as well as the act itself, I do now.

Today, I need to work on the timeline of when these events occurred so I don’t have the body being discovered at ten o’clock when it couldn’t possibly have been dumped there until almost eleven.

Details, details.

I went through this same thing with my last novel. There was a lot going on behind the scenes that affected what my protagonist encountered. Clues can’t just appear with no good reason.

Perhaps I should someday put together a whole book of these behind the scenes pages. Kind of like the outtakes included on movie DVDs.

Nah. I definitely write this stuff as though no one else will see it. In other words, it’s crap. I don’t think I WANT anyone else’s eyes looking at my outtakes.