Development - Kill Your Darlings

Throughout the development of Wardenclyffe there were so many ideas that got scrapped along the way. Sometimes they ended up scrapped because they didn’t fit the story anymore, other times there were just too many ideas for one story. There have probably been well over 50 versions of the first chapter before the one you see now.

The original story was very slow-paced and a lot of the scenes felt like they were just filling space. Bit walking along old abandoned trolley tracks, taking a gondala ride across a large lake, walking through a field of sunflowers. Visually the scenes were very interesting, but there was very little plot. One of the biggest changes came from the change in format of the story itself. Originally it was written as a screenplay which played on visuals a lot more. But when converting it over to a novel, many of those early visuals went right out the window - including a hand-drawn map of the world of Wardenclyffe.

   

And with every revision of the story, there were little pieces removed. Bit no longer begins the story laying under a rusted red truck repairing it, there’s no underwater casino to climb through in Highland, no more traveling Ramen cart lit with lanterns. And while removing these things was right for the story, it’s hard to forget them completely.

This is especially true of the story elements that I got overly attached to. For example in early drafts, the entire entire city of June was essentially just a a massive library. Interconnected buildings in a frozen landscape, each building containing different genres of books. Admittedly this was heavily inspired by a local indie bookstore and while it may have been cut from this story, it’s absolutely getting saved for something else. Just because it doesn’t fit this story, doesn’t mean it’s not still a worthwhile idea.

   

So that begs the question, what happens to all these story ideas when they’re cut? Well for me, there’s a little file on my computer where all of these abandoned ideas go after they’re removed. This idea was inspired by something I heard while listening to The Good Place: The Podcast. The writers talk about how they have a document where they put all their abandoned story ideas and it helps make it easier to remove these ideas from the story. Because this way they’re never completely gone, just tucked away. And sometimes these ideas come back later, or get used in other story ideas. I’ve found this so helpful for making cuts to my story since it’s hard to get rid of parts of the story that you’re really attached to.

And it’s not just the writing that changed either, I have early sketches of covers for the book and interior illustrations that I had drawn myself. Before deciding to ask for help with the artwork, I had intended to do everything myself and I’m so glad I changed my mind on that. My early sketches could never measure up to the incredible art that I ended up with in the book. So now those old cover sketches and rough drawings of maps of my story’s world will just get tucked away as mementos.

   

But in the end I think my book is stronger for having cut all of these things out of it. And even though they’re no longer in the story, I think they still needed to be written and cut to get the story to where it is now. Maybe some of these ideas will even find a way into book 2 of the Wardenclyffe Series!