Writer's block, an owner's guide: Omitted scenes

NaNoWriMo is over and a new month calls. Will Shetterly celebrates with suggestions for dealing with writer’s block. One of them: “ask whether you can omit the scene that’s frustrating you.”

About six months ago I picked up The Far Side of the World - the original of the intriguingly different Master and Commander movie - for a dollar. It seemed like a good deal. I didn’t mean to go to sea. But I enjoyed the book for its depiction of the friendship of men, and next thing I knew I was reading the series from the start, and now I’m up to book 14, and I’m rather thankful that the author, Patrick O’Brian, didn’t live long enough to get far beyond twenty of them.

And he - here’s my point - was very good at omitting scenes. He would just tell you the story up to the point where it was clear the heroes were going to succeed at whatever they were doing, and in the next sentence they’d be back in London starting their next adventure. I kinda like that and I’ll find it a freeing idea if I ever make time to write fiction again. Freeing is probably what we’re talking about when we talk about dealing with writer’s block?

Published on December 1, 2006 at 11:22 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/omitted-scenes.html

2 Comments

[...] Now here’s a coincidence, even a synchronicity. Just yesterday I was telling you about Patrick O’Brian, in a long aside to what I was really trying to say about whether authors can just omit troublesome scenes. It was so long and so half-relevant that I actually wondered if I should just omit it. And today, in a quiet moment between clients, I came across this thought, which I’m quite sure is O’Brian’s own, in the mouths of two of his regular characters: “Are endings really so very important? Sterne did quite well without one; and often an unfinished picture is all the more interesting for the bare canvas… The conventional ending, with virtue rewarded and losses ends tied up is often sadly chilling; and its platitude and falsity tend to infect what has gone before, however excellent. Many books would be far better without their last chapter: or at least with no more than a brief, cool, unemotional statement of the outcome.” [...]

Pingback by Today I Write : Master and Commander, again — December 2, 2006 @ 3:48 pm
.. but how do you KNOW something was omitted in someone else’s published work??

Comment by momo — December 3, 2006 @ 9:03 am

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