Deleted Scenes

After I've watched a movie, I always like to check out the 'Deleted Scenes'. I enjoy seeing the choices that were made at the editing stage and thinking about how they've shaped the end result. As a writer, I find this helps me to think about structure in my own work and to be ruthless in cutting material to get to the real story. I always write too much of everything to begin with and then have to pare back later. Although Annabel, Again is around 25,000 words, I probably wrote about 40,000 words in order to get there.

This means that I have quite a few of my own 'deleted scenes', and so I thought I'd give you one. DO NOT READ ON unless you've already finished the novel, as it will give away the ending.

Endings. Ah. It's no surprise to me that this scene is from the end of the novel. I love writing endings, so I write a lot of them. And then I write more. As I'm working my way through the story, I'm forever having little flashes of how to end things. What I do then is quickly scroll down to the very bottom of my document and write 'End: the sun implodes. Livvy says "Whatever"'; 'End: Summer gets a role as an extra in Home and Away', and so on. By the time I'm approaching the end of my story, I have lots of these little ending notes, and I usually like them all, because I'm just genius like that. So what I do is drive my editor mad (Hi, Sue!) by refusing to end the novel. Instead, I cunningly keep adding new chapters until I've used up all my ending points. It's very satisfying for me, and very annoying for the reader, not to mention my entirely sensible editor.

When I first finished Annabel, I had a few friends read it, and they all said some version of, 'I kept thinking it was about to end, but then it didn't. You need to re-think the ending.' I knew that they were wrong, so I ignored them and sent it off. When Walker Books accepted the manuscript, I said, 'Ha! In your face, crazy friends!'. Then I got my editorial notes from Sue, which basically said, 'What's with all the endings? You need to re-think this.' So I did. Because Sue is way smarter than all my friends put together.

If you are still reading this, despite my earlier ALL CAPS WARNING, I'm going to assume that you've either read the book already or don't care. So here is where I go on to talk about the end. In the novel, things end just after the maniac encounter, with Anna, Livvy and Summer all sitting in Livvy's room doing psycho-chicken™. In earlier drafts, there were several scenes after this, with the girls going on to the netball finals, and one of these alternative endings is what I've reproduced below. You'll see that some of this material is now in the earlier scene, where things actually end in the novel now. What I've done is cut the later scenes, but sneakily worked some of the elements or lines I really liked thought were important to the story into the earlier scene where things now end. You'll also notice that Livvy doesn't seem to 'know' Kate in these scenes, and that's because in earlier drafts, the girls don't meet Kate in the park. When we cut the later scenes, we also decided that it was a good idea to have Kate in the park with her 'maniac' Dad, so that worked quite nicely.

There are always things you lose in cutting material, but the goal is to make the story stronger as a whole, and sometimes that means sacrificing little bits and pieces. Something I really like about the way the novel ends, versus the way the 'deleted scene' ends, is that Summer is with Livvy and Anna until the very last moment. In the earlier version, I organised things so that Anna and Livvy could have their moment alone together, but if you think about it, this is against the spirit of the story in some important ways, so I'm glad things ended up as they did.

So, have a read and let me know what you think. How would the novel be different with these scenes on the end? What do you gain as a reader? What do you lose? Feel free to email me with your thoughts.

Chapter Twenty-two

Kate is good. She’s really good, actually. But I’m better. 
     At half-time, we’re two goals ahead, and I can see she’s getting frustrated. We half-glare, half-smile at each other across our oranges, through the legs of the parents who crowd around.
     She tries everything in the second half, and she’s hard to shake, but I’m in the zone and nothing can stop me. At the centre pass, I zip forward, I cut sideways, I drop back. I take the pass, fire it back across the court to Anna, who seems to be everywhere at once. A few short, sharp passes down the court and into the goal circle. Summer flicks one finger up in a little salute, calling for the ball, jostling herself in closer to the goal. For every goal they score, we get another, and every now and then we steal their centre pass, nudging a little further ahead.
     By the final whistle, we’re four goals in front. We’ve won. It’s over, and we’ve actually won! We’ve won the district finals, with my former nemesis in goals, and my new-old best friend in centre, and me cramped squeezily into two-thirds of the court.
     I shoot a quick glance to the sidelines as Anna and Summer throw themselves at me, screaming. Mrs Chappell is doing a long slow clap as she hurries across. Mum’s doing this little bouncy thing on her heels that says she wants to run over, but is trying not to embarrass me, at least not just yet. She doesn’t know it, but she’s standing next to maniac-guy. I’ll tell her later, maybe, when we’ve put a safe distance between us.
     Eventually, I peel myself off the others and run for my water-bottle, trying to catch my breath. There’s a sudden movement next to me and I look up.
     Kate has pulled her bib off already and is pushing her arms into a jacket as she comes across. ‘Good game,’ she says.
     ‘You too.’ I take a long swig off water, leaving the bottle in front of my face longer than I need to because I don’t know what to say next.
     ‘You’re a great wing attack.’
     ‘Thanks.’
     ‘Did I play you last year, though? I don’t remember.’
     I look across at Anna, but she hasn’t heard. ‘Yeah. I mean, we played you guys. Only I wasn’t in wing attack then, so ...’
     She reaches back and slides one hand up her ponytail, tightening it flat against the back of her head. ‘Oh. Right. Well, you’re pretty good. Best in the comp, easy.’
     Mrs Chappell’s standing just behind Kate, and I can tell she’s listening, although she doesn’t turn around.
     ‘Hey.’ Kate reaches in front of her and pulls her zip up in one clean movement, like punctuation. ‘Hey, maybe we could practice together sometime? I want to try and make the district team next year. I reckon you could too.’
     Anna turns towards us to grab an orange. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘That’d be cool. Actually, a bunch of us practice sometimes. Down near the park. You could come.’ I catch Anna’s eye. ‘If that’s okay, I mean.’
     Anna nods quickly and Kate grins. ‘Sheldon Park? I live right near there. I mean, it’s a few blocks, but it’s pretty close. I can run it in six minutes thirty-five. I’m pretty fast, though.’
     Anna raises her eyebrows. ‘Livvy’s pretty fast, too. We run down there sometimes.’
     ‘Yeah,’ Kate grins. ‘I heard. I prefer to go around the lake, though.’
     Anna bursts out laughing and I hide behind my bottle again, the blood rushing to my face.
     ‘That’s kind of a special track,’ I say. ‘Reserved only for one-off events.’
     ‘Cool,’ Kate says. ‘Maybe we can run it sometime. Dad says you’re pretty fast when there’s a dangerous puppy-wielding psycho behind you.’
     Anna shakes her head. ‘Not psycho,’ she says. ‘Maniac. Psycho is reserved exclusively for chickens.’
     ‘What?’ Kate looks from me to Anna and back again. For a minute I think about telling her, but then I realise there’s no way, because psycho-chicken is one of those things you just have to absorb, through your skin, like a language. You can’t explain it to anyone. It just is.
     I shrug. ‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘It’s just this weird thing. Anna’s a bit mental like that.’
     There’s a jolt in my shoulder as Anna punches me, hard. I punch her right back, laughing.
     ‘Give me your number,’ I say to Kate. ‘I’ll call you up later and we can organise it.’
     We hang around for the presentation and Mum just about busts herself screaming COUGARRRRRSSSS. I officially disown her and stand back watching as she pats the little brown puppy that keeps snuffling her shoes. At the point where she looks up at the man next to her, down to the puppy, and then across at me with a funny look growing on her face, I grab Anna on the arm. Then I call out quickly, ‘I’m going to Anna’s – seeya!’ and we sprint off towards the car park.
     Summer’s ahead of us, already piling her stuff into the boot of her mother’s car, and I walk over. ‘I’m going back to Anna’s,’ I say. ‘Want to come?’
     She looks up, looks at me and across to Anna. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I mean, yeah, but I can’t.’ Her mother sticks her head out the window and looks back. ‘I have to go to my cousins’. Some kind of picnic-thing.’ She pauses. ‘Maybe another time? You could give me a call.’ She grabs a pen and scrap of paper from the boot and scribbles a string of numbers on it, writes ‘Summer’ in big capital letters. In brackets, just after, she writes ‘Lovin’ and passes it to me with a grin.
     I take it and shove it into my backpack. ‘Okay.  I will. I’ll call you.’
     ‘Cool.’
     She jumps in the front of the car and I watch her drive off.

 
Back at Anna’s, we hang out in her room. Her Mum shooshes us about a hundred times and Anna does versions of her stress-out voice in seven different accents.
     ‘Indian psycho-Mum,’ she says. ‘Irish psycho-Mum.’ By the time she gets to New Zealand (enna, lvvy,  ev tld yew eh hendred tems, nt t mek sech e nez), I can hardly speak, I’m laughing so hard.
     Anna goes to the kitchen, very quietly to the kitchen, for some snacks, preferably ones which won’t crunch too loudly, and comes back with a bowl of nuts.
     ‘Your favourite,’ she says.
     Pistachios. My guts go green at the thought.
     ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Only, I don’t really like them any more.’ I tell her about my journey to forgetting and she sits and stares.
     ‘Your Mum is more mental than I had ever imagined,’ she says.
     ‘I know.’
     ‘Just try one.’
     ‘I really can’t. I feel sick just looking at them.’
     She rolls her eyes and pushes the bowl across the bed at me. ‘Don’t be mental yourself. You used to love them.’
     I look dubiously at the bowl.
     ‘Maybe you just needed a break from them.’ She picks up a nut and holds it up to the light, as if it were a precious jewel. ‘Come on, you know you want it.’
     I really don’t, but I want to want it. I want them back. So I take it from her fingers and pop it in my mouth, bracing myself.
     My tongue slides carefully over the smooth surface, testing, waiting. Then I taste it, really taste it; saliva puckers at the corners of my mouth and suddenly it’s the all-time juicy bonanza, all over again. I suck on it slowly, letting the salt sink into my tongue, and grab another one.
     ‘Told you,’ Anna says, grinning with satisfaction. ‘You don’t just suddenly stop liking your favourite things, you know. I don’t care what any psycho-chicken book says.’
     She laughs and I laugh too, almost choking on the nuts. I flop back on her bed and stare up at the tiny star outlines on her roof, remembering all the times I’ve slept under this very sky. Then I can’t work out whether I want to laugh or cry, so I do a bit of both, and when it’s time to go home, I set my watch and run, and I wonder whether Summer will want to keep running, and maybe Kate too, and we could start teams of two-on-two, where one runs and the other one has to try and take out the other team’s runner and defend their own, a kind of attack-defence cross-country event, and then I start wondering whether that could ever catch on as a sport, and if it did, would I rather play that or netball. I wonder all this and a whole bunch of other stuff and I’m so distracted that I don’t think I’m running really fast but it doesn’t matter because there’ll be hundreds more runs later, to Anna’s, from Anna’s, and that’s before we even make a new track to Kate’s. Then I start wondering how fast Kate really is, and whether I can beat her, and before you know it a whole new year lays itself out in front of me — a running, passing, pistachio-eating, maniac-defying psycho-chicken island, population: four.
     All the way home, my sides ache from laughing so hard and the taste of pistachio sits cleanly on my tongue. Halfway across the park, a magpie click-clacks me, swooping down so suddenly out of the clear blue day that my heart jumps right up into my throat. Some little kids on the swings laugh at me, and I don’t care, not at all. Because as soon as I get home, I can call Anna and tell her, and she’ll say psycho-bird! And we’ll fall off the bed together, just in different houses this time, and I’ll know that I can go there tomorrow and the next day and every next day after that for as long as I want. And maybe I’ll take that piece of paper out of my backpack and call Summer up and tell her too.
     When I get home, I go to the bookshelf in the lounge room. I take Dr W. K. Rosenberg’s respected volume and drop it down the back of the shelf, smooshing it in  behind all the other books. Then I find Wonderful World of Science, conveniently shelved under ‘B’ for ‘Boring Subjects I Know Nothing About’.
     I trawl the index and turn to the section on the planets, my finger rolling quickly down the lines of text, until I reach ‘earth --> axis’. There it is. All the Mrs Emerson blahblahblah about 23.5 degrees, and the seasons, and how to run a simulation with a satay stick or similar pointed object (nb. younger readers should ask a grown-up for assistance). That’s all there, just like she said.
     But there’s something else, too.
     Maybe, it says, the earth’s axis hasn’t always been like this at all. Maybe it used to be as much as 54 degrees, and that’s how some of those wacky warm-climate fossils got into the North Pole.
     Actually, it says, the degree of tilt changes all the time. At least every 40,000 years.
     Moreover, it says, it is not inconceivable that a catastrophic natural event in the foreseeable future could shift the earth on its axis — meteor strike, earthquake, another Ice Age, major volcanic eruption, the return of a soapie star once banished to Queensland.
     I knew it. Things are never set in stone.
     I’m going to tell Anna this on Monday. Maybe Summer, too, if she’s interested. We can use her big old head to represent the sun, just like old times. For now, I show Mum, and she sits down with me at the table and insists on helping with the satay stick, just in case I take an eye out.
     About half an hour later, the chops burn, and Mum starts muttering under her breath, so I take the book and put it back on the shelf. I file it under ‘V’ for interesting. Very interesting. And then I grab my hula hoop and go and stand in the driveway and wait for the pizza to arrive.