How to salvage a really awful chapter?

kwanzaabot;9364485 It was a hard decision to make said:

well[/I]).

How do you guys deal with gutting chapters/passages, and more importantly, what's your process for turning them into something worth reading?

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I find what happens most often is I delete the chapter or scene and write a totally different approach to whatever I was trying to achieve with the scene.

Or I just delete the thing and tack on a bit of summary/illustration to the next scene or combine internal stuff with whatever is happening in the next relevant chapter, since maybe I decided the point I was trying to make didn't deserve its own scene.

In other words, I don't usually "salvage" chapters or scenes that seem to be that dysfunctional. I try to convey whatever I want to convey differently.

Two things:
1) I have all my stuff under version control so I don't lose anything.
2) I'll sometimes copy/paste into a separate document to make it easier to pick things out, but then I never use anything from it.

The reality is closer to what buzhidao describes.

It sounds to me like you're already on the right track.

I feel your pain. I've dealt with two scrap-and-re-do posts on SYW for first chapters. But the chapters that replaced them were better, so that's the main thing.

You said it set up your character's motivation. Without specifics, I can't tailor suggestions very well, but I can throw ideas out there. Show an exchange where the prince's father favors one prince over another, setting up a struggle as to who will be the heir. (Doing something like that in my current chapter one. It escalades to swords, so the action should hold the interest if I do it well. If not, it certainly won't be the first chapter one I've scrapped.)

Or, show an incident where someone gets passed over for promotion at work. Where a child is sick and they can't afford medical care (nice sob stuff.)

Generally, more motion, more dialogue, and less exposition seems to improve matters for me.

I delete and either rewrite it or fit in the information another way or redesign the setting.

kwanzaabot said:

How do you guys deal with gutting chapters/passages, and more importantly, what's your process for turning them into something worth reading?

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Depends entirely on the problem at hand. I typically start off writing something worth reading, so the changes I usually make are to fix what might keep the reader from reading.

I've just made the decision to gut one of my chapters. It was 2/3 tell, 1/3 show and set almost completely inside the POV character's head, with the actual action making up maybe 4 or 5 pages of a 15-20 page chapter.

It was boring as hell.

So, I cut it into a new document in case there's anything salvageable (there are one or two passages I'd like to revisit), and removed it from my novel.

It was a hard decision to make, as it helped set up this character's entire motivation (although it didn't do it well).

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I want to point out that just because a chapter is mostly telling and in the character's head doesn't make it boring. The events and thoughts within that chapter does.

Some of my favorite chapters have been "thinking" chapter--where the character is left alone to cope with their thoughts. What I find particularly useful to help these chapters along is to have the character do something to help their thoughts and reflect off of. For example, a knight is trying to cope with the fear of challenging a stronger opponent to a duel so he goes to train. He thinks through what he'll have to do, how he'll cope with that; he'll envision the sparring dummy as his opponent and try to overcome his fear by facing it.

I know I've taken a wrong turn when the story gets harder & harder to write. The wrong turn is generally just a bit before the slowdown. I delete everything from that wrong turn point & almost always end up with a new scene.

I only have one version of a story. I put the stuff I cut in to a file called 'WIPNameCuts' and in only one case did I ever take that cut material back out. (In that case I needed only to 'dial back' a tangent and then the scene allowed the story to flow).

If it has me scratching my head bad enough, I just rewrite it. Not tweak or change some things around, just totally rewrite it. I just keep in mind what I'm trying to do in the scene/chapter, take my time, and write it better.

I'm not big on copy and paste and keep this here and keep this there. If it doesn't work or I don't like, I just rewrite the sucker.

Throw it out, and see how the story works without it. I've done exactly this, but with a chapter I considered well-written. But it was just digressive and did not drive the story forward. So it went.*

caw

* and has stayed went, except that I keep a copy of everything, so I still have it in an old version of the manuscript. I recommend everybody do that. It really does defeat the angst about cutting material from your baby.

blacbird said:

Throw it out, and see how the story works without it. I've done exactly this, but with a chapter I considered well-written. But it was just digressive and did not drive the story forward. So it went.*

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Recently had to do this. It was a cool scene too, well written, I really liked it. But it did absolutely nothing for the story. Not needed at all. It hurt to cut it out, but really helped the story.

I didn't trash it 100% though, I saved it, maybe I can use it later for something else.

I agree with blacbird--throw it out. I had to do that in the edits of my first book, when my editor marked one chapter as "Boring, and more of the same." I was shocked, furious, stomped around, raged at the cats for a couple of days about how IMPORTANT it was...and then sat down and deleted it.

There was some dialogue I thought actually was worth keeping, so I moved it into a scene in the next chapter. It worked. And my editor was right--the book flowed better afterwards. I learned. I'm more careful now about whether each chapter--and each scene--is pulling its weight now. If it isn't, there still might be something salvageable, but it can probably get worked in elsewhere instead of trying to build a new chapter around it.

Throw it away and think of a tense or conflicted situation to bring about the information you want to share. Sit down with the little blinking line and write anything that doesn't include the content of the one you want to toss.

Think of the show Hording Buried Alive. Don't horde boring chapters.

I'm a notorious cutter. Wait, that doesn't sound right. (Cut that line!) I do this a lot in my revision process.

Most cuts can be deleted and forgotten. If you trimmed fat that happened to include world building or character background, I'd save those pieces...any information that you'd put in an encyclopedia of the world or a character bio I'd hang on to just in case it needs to be referenced later. Otherwise it's probably waste sentences.

The way I emotionally deal with big cuts, and edits in general, is to keep an edited copy of the rough draft (and second, third, etc.) with track changes enabled, so that I can see the original underneath the edits. Then I make a new, clean copy where I can move forward without losing the old work, or seeing it.

"Motivation" is "plausible reasons for the things the character says and does". These plausible reasons can be shown in an enormous prologue, or in a one sentence thought, or through dialogue, or through implied hints and winks and scars fingered at appropriate moments.

In fact, when there is little mystery in the plot as such (too straightforward an adventure, for example, with everything being more or less clear from start to finish, except the details of the outcome), then motivation can take over the role of the mystery--providing clues at appropriate moments, and only at a later point showing why the main character or characters do and say what they do and say.

I personally prefer this type of providing an otherwise missing mystery, to the more popular one of a soap subplot about who will boink whom. Unless, of course, it's a story revolving about who will boink whom, but that's a different matter altogether.

"Different matter!" they said all together. ...Watched again Airplane! the other day. Absolute classic.

I'd think long and hard about what it is you're trying to accomplish with this chapter. What needs to happen to advance the story to the next stage? Then think about what your character/characters are likely to be doing to accomplish this (or what needs to happen to them to accomplish this) and the kind of tension and conflict that is likely to arise as a consequence.

Sometimes dull chapters or scenes are simply dull because they drag on too long without anything interesting happening. Other times they're dull because the things that need to be happening aren't.

I recently cut about 18,000 words from an old WIP and used it as the nucleus for a completely new novel that clocks in around 75,000 words. What I discovered is the new stuff I wrote for the new WIP has a completely different flavor. Some revisions allowed me to save most of the 18K nucleus, but other scenes I recycled elsewhere were forced and a horrible fit. So I ditched them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

kwanzaabot said:

That's a good idea, actually. I've got this idea in my head that I need an intro chapter for every POV character before I get down to brass tacks and send them off on their heroic journey-slash-suicide mission, but it doesn't actually add anything to the plot.

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See those bolded words? Methinks this is your problem.

I know the trend nowadays is to emphasize show over tell, but remember that there are plenty of examples where tell is compelling. The Travels of Jamie McPheeters comes to mind. That had quite a bit of tell. Is the tell important? Can the tell be turned into a reminisce about an action? Can you intersperse the action between the tell? The most important rule is, does the reader need to know this?