I have wondered many times after finishing a novel, what to do, (and if there is anything to do), with the pages that were uninvited into the final draft. There is something a mentor once taught me. “The lines that you love, the words that make you feel brilliant, the personal and uplifting self-revelations acquired through the long path of writing the book – those are all the pages, the phrases, and the paragraphs you should discard from the last draft,” she said. “Especially,” she added, “those beautiful poetic sentences you think are your best work ever. Self-intoxication by your own sentences is the most dangerous state of all to the sobering task of rewriting and revision. It can mean the difference between a lean and meaningful novel and one grown overweight with too much sugary substance.” Her advice had always worked for me. I usually write, in the few years it takes me to write novel, thousands of terrible pages, probably many more pages of lousy work than good work.

But in my last novel, something different very happened. I had the amazing luck of attracting a film director to the published work. Set in Jerusalem in 1963, its geography and history made the book cinematically viable, I think. After three years, the film is, at last, “in development” and very close to being made, my contract has been renewed, and I was asked this week to come down to help the screenwriter with some background and character questions. I am surprised and amazed at the new questions that opened up to me once the film began development.

The novel centered on a mother/daughter relationship, a very complex psychological story. But a film requires much more action, and more “story” than a literary novel. I had written a long few chapters about an affair my main character has with an older man before the final draft was consolidated and edited.  I had luxuriated in its sexuality, its passions, especially after confronting and taming all the painful material around the mother/daughter relationship and a suicide that took place before the story began. All very dark and challenging stuff but also difficult and treacherous to deal with psychologically! So when I got to the fifteen-year old protagonist’s first love affair, passions, and the loss of her virginity, I just basked in the light of the senses, so to speak, after so much tragic pain and emotional upheaval. Those chapters were gritty but a little too “beautifully written.” Probably because it was still so new to me, as a writer, to indulge in the pleasures of early sexual memory, there were far too many “self-intoxicating words,” “beautiful phrases,” and rhapsodies.  My mentor and publisher agreed with me that “all the sex with that boy was not very interesting to other people.”

Those sections were omitted from the final book.

  

As time passed, my film director started to get curious, thinking that, for the film, we needed more material. He asked me if there were anything I left out, or anything I could develop to make the film more “filmic.” Soon, (but two full years after publication), I found myself rifling through all those discarded pages, all that powerful but “too beautiful” language. I gave the pages to my director. It could have been because enough time had passed for me to process all that “first love desire” and so taking out the lyrical but disastrous language I had loved once too much was easier, or it could have been that there was simply time now to finally feel a sobering distance from the novel itself. (Distance and process are always united in a unique but mysterious partnership for me when it comes to writing.) But with the film director’s enthusiasm abundant for those “bad” pages,” his editing, and some of my own, nearly all those discarded pages were put back into the work. Eventually, another publisher put out a “movie tie-in” edition of the same novel, once called Edges and now retitled The Fragile Mistress with those pages all added in sections.

I am sure there is something to be learned here besides, “watch what you throw out you because you never know.” (Some writers have told me they hang onto their discarded pages because they begin a whole new novel from them later on.) But it seemed like an interesting footnote that might show me something else I may have missed.

Leora Skolkin-Smith is the author of  The Fragile Mistress. Her new novel, Hystera, will be published by Fiction Studio Books in the fall.