One Novel’s Waste Isn’t Wasted

My weekend was a time full of gratitude that the recycle bin exists in cloud storage.

I had been improving my laptop and doing some physical backups onto external storage and didn’t realize I had kicked my cloud storage into a self-deleting mode.

Hours later, I rescued my old manuscripts after learning the extended storage had zero files that had moved, only folder names because the cloud and laptop were intertwined.

Thank the Lord for the recycle bin.

But speaking of recycle bins, my thought process on unused concepts is that we should never truly throw something away.

My first drafts of Auminous are still there, tucked away with some ideas I hadn’t used.

I had been trying to be original in some ways that only I could make work, with my author voice and ideation pouring into the writing.

Perhaps those ideas will come back to life soon, repurposed into something worth honing into a fine blade, like forged steel.

The smelting process clears out impurities and makes a weapon stronger for it.

In the same manner, we can collect those impurities to turn them into something later down the road.

I suppose the point of this musings post is to say that we should never throw something completely away.

Maybe that mental break a character fictitiously had might be used better down the line in another plot thread that hasn’t been resolved yet.

I still have my The Symphonist: A Light Novel outlines from 2022. I had to rework the magic system many times over to differentiate it from other works, landing on my antiphonal metaphor combat system and the iroseva color spectrum.

I haven’t seen such a thing done in other fiction, so here’s my imprint.

But that doesn’t mean we should throw everything away because it isn’t original.

No story is 100% of your own making without some form of trope.

I believe we can be pioneers of new tropes, but tropes exist for a reason.

Genres also exist due to this.

Heck, even our real world has Jesus as the Messiah (or whatever deity you insert) in religions.

Draw inspiration from things and make your own story that breathes as though you took a breath and exhaled the words onto the page.

We don’t need to be iconoclasts in tearing down the art that came before us, though.

Think of storytelling as a sieve, where things are sifted out. You can still collect that which falls through the filter and take a second sieve that is even finer and do with the material what you will.

Throwing things away isn’t an idea to hold on to, because that kernel of creation might become a great idea later.

I found this to be true with my The Ethereal Winter novel that I will release this coming Q4 winter.

The original plot was more of an alien invasion and eternal snowfall type of story, where the snow wasn’t really your typical snow.

I might still use this idea in another novel. I didn’t throw it away.

I’ve kept it in the back of my mind, where all the rest of my secrets are kept.

If something sounds like your idea, don’t just toss it out.

Work it into the story only you can make, even if it’s another story altogether.

Come on.

There are so many versions of Excalibur out there among all the fictional universes, and I’m not tired of it.

Sometimes it’s in space, other times it’s broken and irreparable.

Once Upon a Time did something cool and made it the rest of Rumpelstiltskin’s dagger.

There’re so many ways to create a new spin on something.

If we throw every idea out, there is no room to shape the clay.

Keep the amazing ideas at the forefront and well-executed. But remember to keep at least a skeleton of things you’ve tossed for later.

You never know when it might come in handy….

Happy writing!