Recorded live at Dragons & Fairy Tales, this episode is for anybody who has a novel or two (or more) sitting in the bottom of their trunk. What are the best ways to re-use old material you’ve set aside? We talk about rewriting entire novels, repurposing plots or characters, and moving stories from one place to another.

Sometimes we do this because an idea is just too good to let sit, but the execution on that idea (at least the first time around) wasn’t good enough. And sometimes we shouldn’t do it at all.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Feed by Mira Grant – it’s 1/3 zombie novel, 2/3 political thriller.

Writing Prompt: “Interspeciated workplace.” Go!

Prompt #2: You just got a “Cease & Desist” from a webcartoonist…

Audience Noises: Delivered on cue, thanks to cleverly positioned signs…

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Don’t hold back. Go ahead and use your good ideas now. Save those cool ideas — repurpose and look for the right project. Beware falling into eternal rewrite. Give yourself time to grow. Watch for zombie darlings that need to be killed again.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 33, Trunk Novels.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And we’re not that smart.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And I’m Howard. [Laughter] Sorry, Dan was making a funny voice.
[Brandon] That’s just his normal voice. He always makes a funny voice.
[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] We are recording live again from Dragons and Fairy Tales, the wonderful bookstore in Eagle Mountain, Utah. Live in front of a non-studio audience. We’re going to do an episode on trunk novels. More appropriately, how to reuse old ideas, when you decide to take them and repurpose them, when you decide that you just want to rewrite a novel. I have several times through my career done… taken old ideas and written new novels off of them. So we’re just going to talk about how we do this. So, Dan, have you ever done this?
[Dan] Yes. I have.
[Brandon] Oh, good.
[Dan] Never successfully.
[Brandon] Never successfully? Oh, what went wrong?
[Dan] Well, I have a novel that I have tried to start and never finished… three different times.
[Brandon] Oh, wow. Which one is this?
[Dan] The Nightbringer.
[Brandon] OK.
[Dan] Which I’m going to try again this fall. We’re going to make it happen this time.
[Howard] Did you do it for Nanowrimo during November?
[Dan] Well, that was when I did it the first time through, was Nanowrimo.
[Howard] Has it occurred to you that maybe the month of November is cursed?
[Dan] That’s the problem.

[Brandon] Many may know the story that I… when I was approached by Tor buying Elantris, but they wanted another book from me. What I pitched to them was a book called Mistborn, the Final Empire. Which I had written a book called Mistborn in the past, and I had written a book called The Final Empire in the past, both of which stink. And I had…
[Dan] I was in his writing group. I can vouch for that.
[Brandon] Yes he can. They are two of the worst books I have ever written. Despite the fact that my skill as a writer was growing better, the books themselves didn’t work. So Mistborn, The Final Empire, which people seem to enjoy as a novel, came from two pretty terrible novels. I’ve done this. The Way of Kings, which is coming out August 31… YAY… is a repurposed novel. I had written a book called The Way of Kings once, and I had decided to rewrite it from scratch and release it.
[Howard] It got some fantastic Amazon reviews.
[Brandon] Oh, yeah, it did. Yeah.
[Dan] And it has been getting them for years.
[Brandon] Yeah. All made up.
[Dan] Talking about Mistborn. One of the things… one of the reasons that I think Mistborn worked very well. You say that that was two of your old books combined together. If I remember, that actually had many other old ideas that all got thrown together. Mistborn was when you took every good idea you’d had in about five years and put them all in the same place.
[Brandon] I pulled out all the stops because I’m like, “Wow, I need to do a series that needs to rock the house.” So I stuck everything in there I could think of.

[Dan] I think… I was going to say I think that’s a really good idea. So my first piece of advice in terms of reusing old ideas is don’t hold back. Every good idea you have, you’re going to have 12 more next week, so go ahead and use them now.
[Brandon] Right. The more you train yourself as a writer, we’ve said, the more you will do this. This is a completely different topic, but it’s very important. A lot of new writers seem to want to hold back the greatest things. They’re going to write this brilliant series, right? And they’ve got these wonderful ideas for how it’s going to go, and then they save them all for books two, three, and four, and things like that.
[Howard] Yes. This is my magnum opus, and I’m not ready to write it yet, so I shall write something small.
[Brandon] No, they write the first book and say the second book is going to be awesome.
[Dan] Book one is just setup for all the cool stuff. No one’s going to get there if there is no cool stuff in the first book.
[Brandon] One of the things I decided with Mistborn was like I’m going to cram this all together and try and tell a trilogy’s worth of story in one book. It worked very well. I find that new authors, and myself in the early days, I did this. I would be like, “Oh, this is the great thing that’s going to happen in book three.” Well, if it’s that awesome, see if you can get it in book one.

[Howard] Put it in book one. The most memorable time I’ve recycled something was a short, not-a-ghost-story ghost story that I put together in which… it came to me when Sandra and I, first night in a new house, the dishwasher is running and when it’s draining, there’s this gargling noise coming from the kitchen that sounds like a voice. I thought, “What if every time the dishwasher drained, the house spoke?” OK. So the house is possessed. You calling paranormal expert after expert to exorcise the house, and the only guy who can fix the problem is the plumber who says, “Oh, yeah, you’ve just got some air here in the valves. Let me… fixed it!” That’s the end. There is no ghost. It’s just… it’s completely random. I totally ended up reusing that in Schlock Mercenary. The big haunted battleship storyline in A Tub of Happiness.
[Brandon] Which is really fun, by the way.
[Howard] Yeah. It’s a fun overall book, but that little segment was so much fun to put in comic book format because ever since then, I’ve had readers e-mailing me saying, “So was it a ghost or wasn’t it? Come on, it sounds like it was a ghost. That can’t just have been random.” Well, that’s why it made the AI insane because that’s so incredibly improbable. I still say it was random.

[Brandon] One of the things… I mean… digging at this for new writers, the questions are why? Why did you decide to reuse it? Why did I decide to rewrite Mistborn rather than doing something new? I guess I’ll answer my own question on that. Because with me, in this case, I really was disappointed in the books I had written, and yet the ideas were stellar. Mistborn had a really great magic system, and so did Final Empire. Hemo… ferrochemy was originally in The Final Empire, allomancy from Mistborn. There were these great magic systems that I didn’t want to lose. I had some great characters at places. The books had just failed. I wanted to take them and make them succeed. So my real motivation in that was not wanting to toss these great ideas. Why do you keep trying Nightbringer?

[Dan] Because it’s really cool. No, it’s a very good idea, and I think that it’s going to work. Actually, the example that I want to use right now though is a different one. When I was in high school… and this is where I make some embarrassing confessions to everybody. I am a role player and have been forever…
[Howard] Oh, no. [Crowd noises]
[Dan] And… it gets worse. [Monkey noises] There’s the monkey noises. No, it gets worse than role-playing. I wrote some Rift fan fiction in high school. Oh, my word. [Thunder] And we get thunder. Even God is upset with me for writing some role-playing game fan fiction. OK. So here’s the deal. OK? I was writing this book in high school, and it was so bad, and it was so dumb, but it had a couple of really cool ideas in it about what does it mean to be human. So, just yesterday, I was talking to an editor on the phone about a proposal that we’re kind of bouncing back and forth. That is the phrase that they threw out, was, “What we really think this is going to be about is what does it mean to be human?” I thought, “Well, I’ve already written some Rift fan fiction about that. I mean, man.” So I pulled out a couple of these old ideas and reworked them and found that they fit exactly what this editor was looking for. So sometimes those old ideas that you think are weird and are never going to work, they will find a place in a new project.
[Howard] I have a folder on my desktop called “off-track” which is… when I will script something and realize, “No, that’s not the direction the plot wanted to go,” but I really like the dialogue there. But because of the way I format things, it’s already laid out as a strip, so I’ll just throw it into that folder. Some of the stuff in there is, at this point, eight years old. But I will dig through it and sometimes find dialogue bits and I realize, “Oh, that’s perfect.” Some of the things that are in there that are wonderful are cases where I will look at dialogue that I wrote for Tagon and realize I thought he actually said that in canonized strips. That has become part of the backstory. That is something that he said that is informing all of my writing for him, and so it’s perfectly OK if now he actually says it.

[Brandon] We’re going to do our book of the week this week from Dan. He has the book…
[Dan] Yes. The book of the week this week is Feed by Myra Grant. This is a zombie novel, but a very atypical one. It is kind of one third zombie novel, two thirds futuristic political thriller. It is about three bloggers. What it’s… very quickly, because I think this is incredibly clever. When the zombie apocalypse happens, the mainstream media is ill-equipped to deal with it because they don’t believe that it’s actually happening. Whereas all of the nerds and the online bloggers, they recognize it immediately and they start spreading the word. So the world is saved because of bloggers. In this future, there are three bloggers who start following a presidential candidate around through zombie infested, yet stabilized, America. It is fascinating. Like I said, it’s a lot of zombie stuff, a lot of political stuff, a lot of blogging Internet stuff. It’s great. It’s, again, Feed by Myra Grant. I recommend it very highly. You can get it at…
[Brandon] audiblepodcast.com/excuse
[Dan] I even remember this.
[Crowd noises]
[Howard] Those were supposed to be zombie noises. Actually was kind of frightening.
[Dan] Yes. I don’t know about that. Anyway.

[Brandon] All right. Let’s bring this back on the topic. I want to do now the negative side. What do our readers… listeners have to beware of in repurposing old ideas? Are there pitfalls? Are there any?
[Dan and Howard] Yes.
[Brandon] All right. I’ll tell you one right now while the other two think. One thing I’ve seen from new writers that’s a big problem is when they keep trying to repurpose the same thing over and over again. They finish a novel and then say, “OK. I can do better. I’m going to do it again.”
[Howard] That becomes the eternal rewrite instead of actually repurposing something.
[Brandon] Right. A lot of times, I feel that you need to give yourself enough time to grow between books to do this better. I would suggest… doing… now this is me, I write a lot of books, but… if you could wait three or four books in between repurposing an old one, until you have really changed as a writer and have grown as a writer. Otherwise, it’s probably better just to redraft the previous book. When we talk about repurposing, I’m meaning writing it from scratch from the beginning.
[Dan] Or just… repurposing, like you said, could be taking one idea and putting it into a different context. Which I think is often a better use of it than just rewriting.
[Brandon] I call it putting the book into the wood chipper. Right. You stick the book in the wood chipper and all the ideas pop out the back, and you…
[Howard] And now you’ve got Fargo.
[Brandon] Yeah. Oh, you went there.
[Dan] We all went there mentally, as soon as you said it.
[Brandon] Uh, huh. Any problems, Howard?

[Howard] I think the biggest problem with it is that if you’re too attached to whatever the old thing was, you may not make the hard decisions that needed to be made in order to fix it. If it was a darling that needed to be killed once, and now you brought it back in another form, it may need to be killed again. You may not have done it right. You may be looking at it… you may be too emotionally attached to it.
[Background voice — zombie darlings?]
[Brandon] That one I’ve got a story on. In Elantris, there’s a set of deleted scenes, you can find them on my website, where my… Wow, it’s really raining. I’m glad we’re in here. There’s a sequence with a new character that’s kind of the the end that comes into the book, that my agent suggested I cut. It’s called The Mad Prince, you can go read about it. When I cut it, I said, “That’s all right. I guess I’ll use him in another book some time.” My agent said to me, “Brandon, no. This character didn’t work here. He’s not going to work somewhere else. This character needs to just go into the files of some day you’ll post it on your website.” And I did.
[Howard] This character has been hit by balefire. He never was.
[Brandon] Yeah. Never was. That was really, really, actually solid advice. Because what I had written that character, I had been not quite as good of a writer as I’ve become. That character was a character from a less skillful time. It was not a very three dimensional character. It was there just for laughs. It didn’t fit the book for multiple reasons. So you can go read about that. Another folly with trunk novels that I’ve heard… also another agent story… Joshua has lots of stories. He had an author, I’m not going to mention the author by name because I don’t want to out them on this. But he had an author who got published. Their books were huge, were selling… he was really hot. And the editor came to him and said, “OK, what else have you got?” He went and got the trunk novels. All the novels he had written before he got published. This is why I call them trunk novels, because that’s what Joshua called them. They were in the author’s quote unquote trunk. The author brought them out and said, “Here we go. I’ve got six books that we can now do.” He sold them all and got tons of money, quote unquote. For a writer, tons of money. Yet when they came out, the reviews all said, “Wow, this author seems like they have not gotten better, they have gotten worse.” In fact, I read this author’s books during this era, and I thought, “Oh, this author kind of lost it.” The author hadn’t lost it, the author was just releasing the books that were not quite as good as the books that they had been doing. This is the reason why when people say to me, “Oh, are you ever going to release those old books of yours?” I have Joshua’s voice in my head saying, “Look what happened here. You don’t want people to assume you’re getting worse as a writer.”
[Howard] I can’t remember who gave the advice at LTUE, but his advice was once you are successfully published, once you have a career, once you have a catalog behind you, burn the trunk. Because even if you are smart enough to never publish these things, after you die, somebody…
[Dan] Your attention grubbing son will pull them out.
[Howard] One of your kids will say, “Hey, there might be some more money in this.” And then they sully your name forever.
[Brandon] I think they can be used. I’m posting some of that stuff on the website, with huge disclaimers that say, “This was when I was not so good as a writer.” My agent doesn’t even like that. He says, “No, they’re going to then associate your name unconsciously with bad writing, and you don’t want to send that to them.” But sometimes I ignore him.

[Howard] But sometimes the sand blows carelessly and freely.
[Brandon] Yes, it does. OK, we’re going to do your first strip next time. You have to give us a writing prompt, then.
[Howard] OK. I’m going to take a word from my first strip. Interspeciated workplace.
[Dan] Nice.
[Howard] Take the phrase “interspeciated workplace” and run with it to someplace besides Schlock Mercenary.
[Brandon] Or he’ll sue you. That’s your other writing prompt. Howard Tayler sues you.
[Howard] I just got a cease-and-desist from a web cartoonist.
[Dan] When you write schlock fan fiction.
[Brandon] OK. This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you to our wonderful audience for cheering and making monkey noises and… I’m going to hold one up now.
[We love Jordo]
[Brandon] And loving Jordo. This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.
[Applause]