Hello, friends! Welcome back to the A to Z Challenge. For this year’s challenge, I’m telling you a little more about the universe of Tomorrow News Network, my upcoming Sci-Fi adventure series. In today’s post, Q is for:
QUAD-UNITS
So far, most of my A to Z posts have focused on things that will appear in The Medusa Effect, book one of the Tomorrow News Network series. A few posts have covered material that I plan to include in future books. But this post is the first time we’re talking about something that I had to cut.
Litho Colony’s residential district was originally made up of just a few small prefab housing units. As the colony grew, more prefabs units were added, and recently a dozen new quad-units were constructed as well.
Quad-units are larger housing modules designed to accommodate up to four separate families. They’re really big, really bulky structures. Maybe they’re a little too big and bulky, or at least that’s what some of the older colonists say. But given how successful and prosperous Litho Colony has been, A.E.I. has plans to build at least a dozen more quad-units next season. It’s really the best way to keep up with the colony’s population growth.
In early drafts of The Medusa Effect, I devoted several paragraphs to the quad-units. Those paragraphs helped me show that Litho Colony is prosperous and growing. However, I say that and show that in other ways too, and that particular section of text was really slowing down the pace of the story. To make matters worse, this was in a scene where the pace needed to start picking up.
So reluctantly, I cut that whole section. Why am I telling you about something that didn’t make it into the book? Because I know some of the people reading these A to Z posts are fellow writers. Some of you have also had to cut stuff out of your stories, stuff that you enjoyed writing, stuff that you really, really, really wanted to hold on to.
This post is basically a quick reminder to you, my fellow writers, that you’re not alone. We all have to make tough choices in our writing sometimes. It’s okay to cut stuff if you have to.
Next time on Tomorrow News Network: A to Z, the official name of the Redlands is Arfwedson Circumcurio. But don’t worry. Nobody who lives on Litho ever calls the Redlands by their official name.
Planet Pailly 
Yes, I’d say cutting out info is a necessary evil. The beauty of a created world is that the author is the sole authority. One doesn’t have to second guess about how much material is enough. When researching real events, craft/skills, locations, etc., I don’t always know where to draw the line. Have I included enough info? Too much? With a created setting, I already know I’m going to write too much. It will have to be pared down for a reader’s enjoyment; it’s just part of the process. 🙂
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Yeah, I can see how the pressure is different when dealing with reality. The second T.N.N. book has a more historical setting, and I’m already worried that I might overlook something important.
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Must have been painful, it’s not easy to cut your own writing. It’s not easy to be able to see this is slowing down the story.
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Yeah but sometimes it isn’t clear till the last moment what part should be cut out and what part should be kept!
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True. And when it does become clear, it can break your heart just a little bit. But in the end, you just have to do what’s right for the story.
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That problem happens to me even in shorter pieces. I write a 1000-1500 word story, and I sometimes have to cut out the descriptive/flowery language part which I had the most fun writing but doesn’t serve a purpose to the story other than side-table decoration.
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Yeah, it’s so easy to get emotionally attached to the things we write. It’s one of the reasons beta-readers are so important. Sometimes we need that outside perspective to tell us things aren’t working.
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I think it happens in any kind of writing. Along the lines of what Namratha described, I’ve had to cut portions of blog posts, portions I really liked, but that weren’t crucial for the overall point, and were making the post too long, or were just too much of a side rabbit hole.
What sometimes makes it easier, at least for me, is to save it so that it might still get used someday.
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That’s usually my solution too: save it for future use. In this case, though, I am 99% sure I won’t be able to reuse this stuff about quad-units. Well, 98% sure. Maybe I’ll find a place for them somewhere.
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