Deleted Scenes

There's nothing to see here, silly. It's a picture book. Picture books are short. You wouldn't have deleted scenes in a picture book, would you?

[cue the sound of many writers laughing hysterically]

As I said here, the book that became No Bears was originally about ducks. No ducks, that is. It was entitled No Ducks in This Story. When we decided it had better be about bears instead, sections of it were re-written to reflect that, but the basic shape of the book remained the same. What did happen as part of the revising process, though, was that the text became shorter and tighter. A number of Ruby's 'asides' were cut; in working to establish a voice for her, I had overworked things and many of her little comments weren't really needed. Here are some examples, in their original duck-ish form.

From the beginning:

In the first place, ducks are just weird, with their beady little eyes and their quacky little beaks. Just look at them … I mean, NO! Don’t look at them. Well, you can’t, can you?

Because there are NO DUCKS in this story.

Not even a single one.

Aren’t there enough stories about ducks already? Seriously. Everywhere you look it’s just ducks ducks ducks, ducklings ducklings ducklings. Always trying to be all cute and fluffy, with their swimming and their diving and their crossing the road in creepy little lines and …

NO! ENOUGH WITH THE DUCKS ALREADY!

Ducks are OVER, I’m telling you. They’ve had their chance!

And from the end:
 

See how there were NO DUCKS in this story?

Not even a single one!

You liked that, didn’t you?

It was great, wasn’t it, to be able to relax and read a story without the danger of some beady-eyed weirdo going QUACK in your ear?

You see, there were just too many of these. I was hammering the point home. And as I revised, I came to trust that Ruby's voice was coming through anyway, without so many of these little interjections.

Something else that was lost, after some wailing and gnashing of teeth, was the phrase "Little Did She Know" from the first page spread, which originally read:

 

Words like Once Upon a Time and Happily Ever After and Little Did She Know.

 

I had a vision that on the very last spread, where Ruby is declaring the success of her no bears/ducks story, the bear/duck in question, would be playing with the words Little Did She Know somewhere in the background. I still love that idea. But in order to make that ending work, I needed the phrase to appear earlier, which is why I'd added it on that first spread, where it really didn't fit. The other phrases are common fairytale language. But Little Did She Know isn't and no matter how I tried to turn a blind eye to it, it just didn't fit. So it had to go, and once it had gone, there was no way of getting it in at the end. It just didn't make sense any more.

Sometimes there are things in a book that you love, and try to keep, to the point of squeezing the book unnaturally in order to accommodate them. But the truth is that No Bears works without that line; the point is made without it and if you didn't know it was there, you certainly wouldn't miss it. In the end, I guess that's the process by which a lot of scenes end up deleted.