"The Unseen Story" series 1-- The Cut scene

Welcome to the first post for "The Unseen Story"--The Cut Scenes...

The question: Do you like it when an author shares that cut scene from their book?

Authors: Do you share scenes that you've cut from the book? Was there a particular reason for scrapping that scene?

Include your answers in the reply box below. Here are my answers.

I don't normally share the scenes that don't make it to the final version. But I have talked about them. Sometimes I've shared why an opening scene was pushed back and a new scene took it's place (Murder Through Time was like that). Today, I'd like to share one scene that was cut from one of the books in the Peterson Estate series...

I did lose the original stories for the series. I had 7 fully finished books before graduating from high school in 1994, so you can imagine how upset I was when I lost them. I thought the stories were gone for good, so I threw out the notes. Had I known that the main character would haunt my mind, I wouldn't have done that lol! But Emily Peterson did and I wound up rewriting her story from memory--or I tried. There were a lot of scenes that were changed over the process, some of them I forgot, some that just didn't work anymore.

When I finally got to the point where I was getting published, I had learned A LOT. I talked to different people in the field between publishers and editors. I was discussing this book with someone along those lines about the series. Though it wasn't published, I was given a lot of important feedback about the story. The first book was eventually published years later as a result, but they didn't want the series. That's a different story, obviously, but here is what I learned, then I'll share the scene.

First of all, the original was written in first person, and the POV was everywhere. I was hopping around into different characters' heads, not realizing that it's a no-no. I had no idea in the beginning. That was one of my first lessons as a writer. I changed it to third person and kept the POV on Emily Peterson, which meant the one chapter that I had wouldn't work because it was in Jill's POV. At the time, I didn't know how to shift to different POVs or how to do it well. I've learned that since.

The entire chapter was in Jill's POV, and the idea came from the movie Labyrinth, which I had seen sometime before the book was written. I even drew the map itself so I could get the motions (left-turn, right-turn) right in the story, and where all of the "booby traps" were in the story. That part was fun to do lol. The chapter took the longest to write because of that. Anyway, once I learned about POV, I scrapped the chapter and kept it all in Emily's POV, which I had her worry about Jill, wonder where she was, etc. And then Jill returned with a story of a lifetime and a new character with her, who I thought was hot (he resembled Arnold Schwarzenegger, with the high cheekbones). In this new scene, I have Jill saying "I've got a story to tell you!" or something like that. While the story is shared off-scene, I did share a little of the storyline but kept the POV where it belonged, with Emily. Even though that part of the story was cut, the reader doesn't miss it because it flows from one scene to the next without any plot holes, which tells me it wasn't needed anyway. And I think that's how you know the scene isn't needed. I learned so much from that.

So, now it's your turn, writers and readers... Thank you for taking part in this blog post. Remember, you can follow me on Instagram and Facebook, and sign up for my mailers at any time. By being a member of my site, you can get notifications for my blog posts too, which isn't the same thing as signing up for my mailers. You can do that here. Thank you!!!!

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