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  • Meet Miriam
  • A Stone for Bread
  • Absolution
  • Buy
  • Short Stories
  • Blog Posts
  • Events
  • Contact

Tips for Writers: The Outtake File

Warning: Never delete that page you hate! Or a character who’s all wrong! Or trash a manuscript in disgust!

 

Certainly, we writers all have those moments. And yes, I delete lines here and there, even paragraphs but almost never entire pages of a manuscript I’m working on. Instead, I cut the passages I’m unhappy with or that aren’t right for a particular scene and paste them into an outtake file. These files then become a reservoir to which I return again and again for an image or character or bit of dialogue that originally seemed wrong but works just fine after other revisions.

 

Occasionally I’ve discovered that a piece I’ve cut from one manuscript fits perfectly into a different manuscript. These are often the “darlings” Stephen King talks about when he advises writers to “kill” our darlings. By this, King means to edit out those images and passages we fall in love with but which slow a story’s pace or fall within a section that should be cut. (See my post “Farewell My Darlings.”) So I save every one of my deleted darlings, partly because I’m an obsessive rewriter who often finds a place for passages I like. I also save every draft of the novel I’m working on.

 

Two years ago, I took a look at a manuscript that twenty years before I had put aside as unworkable. As I read through it, I understood that we writers actually do develop and hone our craft the more we write. From this vantage, I immediately saw what was wrong with the discarded manuscript and set to work. I cut one major character and replaced her with a different character then rearranged the novel’s structure, adding and cutting along the way. These edits took only a couple of months. The revised manuscript became A Stone for Bread to be published this coming October by Livingston Press of West Alabama University.

 

(Note: Another thing I save is my research from every novel I have ever worked on, even after a novel is published. We writers never know when we might need some never-utilized fact or story tucked away in our files.)

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A Stone for Bread by Miriam Herin

Recent Posts
  • On May 11, 2020, Miriam’s second novel A Stone for Bread won the 2020 Eric Hoffer competition Legacy Award, which placed the novel on the short list for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize. Prior to publication, the Stone for Bread manuscript was a top-ten finalist in the 2014 International Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Novel Competition. In 2016, it was nominated for North Carolina’s prestigious Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Published by Livingston Press of the University of West Alabama, the novel received a starred Kirkus review through the Kirkus Indy program and was cited by Kirkus as an Indy Best book of the year for 2016. It was a 2017 Finalist in the International Book Awards, Literary Fiction category.
    February 21, 2022
  • Coming Soon: THE BASILISK, a novel of 12th Century France
    February 21, 2022
  • Coming Soon, Miriam’s medieval novel THE BASILISK
    February 17, 2022
  • 1. Lucky, The Backstory: A Grassy Field and a Basketball Goal
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My Readers Say

With a sharp eye for detail, Herin weaves a riveting and compassionate narrative out of lifelines that have echoed across the decades and become part of my own.

L.C. Fiore

This is a supremely ambitious book from a thoroughly gifted writer.

Joseph Bathanti

But here’s the main thing I have to tell you: A Stone For Bread is an irresistible page-turner.

Judy Goldman
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