I'm curious about what all of you do with your deleted scenes or chapters that didnt quite make the final cut. Do you repurpose them in other projects? Do you collect them for a novella? Do you simply delete them and never think of it again? I'm currently holding on to all of my deleted scenes from various projects. some are easily repurposed, others i'd like to turn into a collection of shorts. who knows... i'm a file junky! i cant just delete them and be done with it
I don't delete things. I have a scrap document for each project and label where it's from in the story. I have a spare parts document for a project I haven't worked on in almost two decades (which sounds frightening but I stopped working on it in my teens). But yeah. Save everything. It helps for a few reasons. I see how I've grown and I can pull stuff back in if I need to.
They make good short stories sometimes. Particularly because they're non-contextual, as in they make no sense because everything that led up to it is now "missing." Sandwich it between a new beginning and ending and you might have something.
I've done a couple of deleted scenes posts on my website's blog and linked on my Twitter account. They're mostly jut a fun extra for readers of whatever book they originally spawned from. I just go back and copy/paste them from the earlier draft they were cut from.
I honestly don't have deleted scenes. All of my books are heavily plotted so the scenes I end up writing, 100% of them wind up in the book.
I tend to have cut scenes and chapters kept in a sub-folder of the WIP Some definitely get redeployed. I tend towards "pantsing" so my work can have a few false starts - one of the openings in my current work now introduces a character around ch4. Not gonna lie -- mostly they just fill up dropbox, but you never know.
