Concerning Ghost Chapters
Sometimes a chapter you’ve written, revised, and polished twenty times just doesn’t work with the overall flow of book. Then, either you or your editor (ideally both, in a meeting of the minds), has to cut the cord: “Sorry, that chapter or subplot has to go.”
In A Queen in Hiding, a subplot about a spy/assassin named Gretna just had to go. She was a delicious character in her own right, and she served higher narrative purposes, but her devious machinations became distracting. So out she went.
But—is she really gone? I don’t mean that I will recycle those chapters into some other work; I’m not even sure that I could find or recover those drafts. (I’m not sentimental about such passages and they aren’t my “darlings.”) I mean, that even though she doesn’t appear in the final manuscript, she lingers around the edges of the fictional world. I inserted just one phrase where the spymaster says he will try to send an agent to Liddlecup—and that leaves the door open for Gretna to still inhabit her shabby rooming house and still try to ingratiate herself into Tidewater Keep. So she’s there for me, if not for the reader. A phantom presence, a danger that lurks.
Other deleted chapters and events enrich the series. I wanted to show how character X discovered an important piece of information—now I know, down to the exact phrasing. Another deleted chapter traced how character Y recovered from a trauma—although the scene is gone I know who helped her and how. So the time and energy spent on the chapters that end up on the cutting room floor isn’t wasted; the scenes leave an aura behind, like a bird dropping a feather.
The deleted chapter that haunts me the most originally fit toward the end of Book I. The Wyndton family traveled to Gulltown for Solstice Fest. It was a quiet interlude (and thus out of place near the book’s crescendo). Two sisters shared confidences and then the whole family celebrated the holiday by buying strawberry ices and by joining the processional, carrying tall tapers. I can still taste the ice, see the candlesticks, and feel the mundane happiness and irritation of a family united . . . for what turns out to be the last time. But since neither the characters and nor my readers could know that this was the last time, the poignancy that I invested was too private and self-indulgent. It had to go.
In my experience, “Director’s Cuts” of movies are usually less interesting and more digressive than the studio release. Studios have accumulated experience about how to tell a story most effectively; directors lose sight of their audience’s needs when they insist that every drop of their vision is precious.
Ghost chapters have to stay ghosts. The real tricks lie in finding ways to share with reader the perfume of their passage on the wind and in creating a sense that the fictional world is populated by people or events that may always remain un-dramatized, but give the reader a sense of depth and a flicker of a shadow.
