In today’s post, I’ll look at an aspect of worldbuilding the reader doesn’t see – because it doesn’t come to light: abandoned ideas and backstory that don’t make it into the final cut.

I have once seen a mention that most writers cut 20% of the story. When I began, that idea felt unreal – in my blissful ignorance, I couldn’t imagine that anything I wrote wouldn’t be important for the story. But, fortunately, I learned. Through my own experience and through the helpful feedback of my beta readers. It’s hard to guess how much the cuts amounted to, even for the first book I finished some time ago, but I know it’s much more than 20%; my best guess is between 25% and 35%. And while some of it was pure “fluff”, there’s a lot that didn’t make it for other reasons.

Quality over quantity

In my beginnings, and being oblivious to the deeper parts, a lot of what I wrote were combat scenes. A damn lot of them, with not as much story between them. I guess if Michael Bay made fantasy movies instead of Transformers, the result would’ve been similar to my first attempts. The problem arose soon enough – with so many of them, it was hard to differentiate between them and easy to get lost. And their individual impact was low.

Hard as it was at first, the solution was relatively simple – I cut a lot of those scenes, reusing the good elements and making sure the individual impact was higher. Quality over quantity. And it gave me more time to focus on the actual story with the space freed by those cuts.

Drawn-out intro

When I began, it was easy to want to tell all the backstories and the worldbuilding, and I believed it was needed right at the beginning, so the reader has all the information at hand. We all make mistakes, I guess. This led to a low pace in the early book. By the time something noteworthy for the whole story started to happen, it was more than 30% through the book.

Eventually, I realized (with the help of my beta readers) that a lot of that could be compressed into mentions, especially if the details weren’t that important (another hard lesson to learn). Again, this led to repurposing some elements and major cuts to excessive combat scenes with low impact. The same was the case with the early development of some characters, which benefited from better pacing.

Excessive backstory

It’s easy to create a complex backstory – it gives our stories depth. But, for a beginner, it can be difficult to find the sweet spot for how much to show and when.

When I started, I wanted to tell in detail the backstory of the conflict, which takes place several generations before the “main” story. Even underdeveloped, it was around 20000 words – the size of a novella. Along with the drawn-out beginning, the result was that it took way too long to get to the main point. I tried to compress that story down to 1-2 chapters, but that failed because it was simply too much to tell in such a limited scope.

Eventually, I made the hard decision. I cut that part completely. Not to delete it forever, but to use it later. Back then, I even expanded it, in a rough version, to almost double length, which made it clear that this could easily be a separate story – one I haven’t had the chance to develop further since then, but one I plan to return to, eventually.

The lesson was also that it can be hard to judge the scope of some elements and how to tackle them until we try a couple of times. The backstory proved itself to be a solid foundation for a future prequel, where I can do the events justice more than a compressed intro in the first book would allow.

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Despite the tough decisions, I look back at those choices with fondness – a part of the early learning curve and the ability to make hard decisions and to take advice and feedback that aren’t always easy to accept at first, even when you know it’s meant well.