re-use-renew-recycle

We green bin the organic matter and blue bin the paper, plastic, glass. Buy the big 5 liter bottle water instead of the case of 24 500ml bottles, and turn off the water while we brush our teeth. But how about writing? Do you re-use, renew, recycle there?

I know I do.

It usually goes something like this:.

I’m revising and revising and revising. Why am I wasting using so much energy on making this one damn scene work? Because I luuuuurve it. It’s my babeee! A level of writing brilliance the likes of which I have never achieved before!!

And it’s got to go.

It doesn’t work, doesn’t belong in the current work. So I cut and save it in a file, because I can’t just delete it as if it’s radiance had never borne my genius to the page.

::coughcoughhackhack:::

Then one day I’m working on another opus, and I remember that bit of  shinny, and think, Hey, I can make it work in this ms.  Dutifully I copy and paste my old love into the new ms.

And I’m revising, and revising, and revising, and editing, and deleting, and by the time I’m done, there’s maybe one sentence left of the original.

#recyclefail.

Or is it?

The original deleted scene or bit of dialogue was still a jumping off point that resulted in something concrete that was a keeper.  To be honest I rarely do this anymore. The original scene was for those characters/that story, even if it ultimately didn’t work.

Here’s another example: Every once and awhile I come across a bit of stage business, or description that makes me do a double-take. It sounds uncomfortably too familiar. That’s because I’m repeating myself. Hero A in this mss, is wearing the exact same outfit that Hero B in another mss wore. Heroine C moves in the exactly described—almost word for word—way as Heroine D.  It’s funny because most of the time it doesn’t jump out at me until the umpteenth reading/revising. It’s not funny because it always leaves me with an icky feeling in my gut. Is my creativity or vocabulary so limited that I’m already repeating myself with barely half a dozen unfinished manuscripts under my belt?

Definitely #recycle fail.

I’ve heard readers talk about writers repeating themselves; how all of best-selling Author A’s love-scenes read like they’re from a master blueprint, etc., so I take small comfort that I’m not alone in this.

Am I?

*gulp*