Diane A. S. Stuckart | How To Recycle An Old Plot Idea

One of the items under the tree for me this Christmas was a bottle cutting kit. If you're old enough, you might remember this gadget spawned of the early 1970s ecology movement (yep, the same one which eventually morphed into the current "green" trend). The idea was to keep those pesky no-deposit, no-return bottles from cluttering up the landfills. All it took was a spin with a special cutting wheel, followed by quick applications of heat and cold, and then, voila, your useless empty bottle was now a handy drinking glass, or a coaster, or a mini-terrarium.

Being a crafty sort, I'd always wanted to give bottle cutting a try. I had visions of creating cool-looking stuff out of all our empty wine bottles and then distributing my eco-friendly designs as presents. And so I was quite pleased when Santa filled this particular item on my list. I now have my kit and a whole box of empty wine bottles to play with (no, we don't drink THAT much; my husband had the foresight to start collecting the empties well in advance of December). Guess what all y'all are getting for Christmas this coming year!

But what does that have to do with writing? Remember my box of empty wine bottles? Tucked in a corner of my writer's imagination there's a similar recycle box. This one, however, contains spare plots and unused characters. All are leftover from books that were outlined but never written, or else were edited out of the final version of books that did see print. And darn it all, just like with the empty wine bottles, I hate to see these perfectly good remnants go to waste. This means that, whenever I begin a new story, I can't help but sift around in that virtual box to see if I can salvage one of my discards, and then cut it up and rearrange it for my latest project.

I've had a fair amount of success with this. My most recent resurrection was a plot that I'd outlined more than half-a-dozen years earlier. Three other writers and I had put together a proposal for a paranormal romance anthology. My contribution was a darkly sensual historical novella about a beautiful New Orleans perfumer who accidentally sells her soul to the devil's representative. Unfortunately, the collaboration never panned out, leaving me with an intriguing plot that was too limited to expand into a full-blown novel. So, into the virtual box it went. A few years later, I was invited to submit a short story to an anthology with a paranormal theme. I dusted this baby off, moved the timeframe from 19th century New Orleans to modern day Chicago, tightened the storyline, and ended up with what I feel was a successful short story published in a collection called ENCHANTMENT PLACE.

Of course, you can't reclaim every surplus character and plot. The author of the long out-of-print book on bottle cutting that I bought for inspiration declares that some bottles are distinctly uncuttable. Same thing with your writing leftovers; some should remain permanently in the recycle bin. But never hesitate to take another look at a piece of your writing that you once dismissed as trash. With a little more effort and an extra dash of imagination, that throwaway prose might one day reemerge on paper as something special, indeed.

Diane A.S. Stuckart