The Cutting Room Floor

There's a distinct process to writing to get it to the point of completion. It takes more than just coming up with characters and with stories. Sometimes the process involves leaving things you thought were great behind, or even completely changing the direction of where you were headed.

In the process of making movies, there's often entire hours of film that are left behind - in the old days, literally sliced off of reels of celluloid film and left on the floor of the editing room (known as the Cutting Room) - for any number of reasons. Maybe the scenes just didn't fit in with the overall theme, or interrupted the flow, or just presented redundant or unnecessary information. DVD special features that showed these deleted scenes - especially with commentary tracks - were my favourite part of owning DVDs as a kid, and part of what made me want to become a writer in the first place. Watching the process of creating, and then refining, sequences and scenes until they fit, or reworking them for a later date, is fascinating.

I never see it for books though. I rarely ever see a "deleted scene" for writing, especially in the digital age. If something doesn't work, it's easier to just highlight and delete it from a file than it is to try and keep it for archives. It's somewhat sad because I know a lot of writers who get discouraged early on in the process because they think it has to be perfect the first time around when, in reality, it doesn't.

I'm not going to pretend I'm any great writer, or that Martingale Fairytale is some literary masterpiece. I'm not here to make sweeping claims. But what I am here to do is show a little bit of the process - the timeline it takes to get to the end, and the things we lose on the way. For those of you who, like me, love to see how the sausage is made, this is for you:

Version History

[The first version of Martingale Fairytale shows up in 2013 after a failed attempt at writing a story featuring my namesake character Snowshoe.]

• Version 1 is the first time I started creating a truly unique setting. My previous attempts at writing FOE put it in Manehattan, the original story's setting, which was a little too restrictive for me. At the time I started writing, Neigh Orleans wasn't done yet as a setting. I was inspired mostly by the Fallout 3 DLC Point Lookout, and wanted to work with those ideas. Caveats to the setting: I'm Canadian and had never even visited New Orleans before.

  v1's basic plot involved Doctor String Bean, known mostly as Doc or Doc Bean in my notes, and was set in the Louisiana-inspired setting of Martingale. Doc was part of a Stable known as Stable 222 that was buried underneath a railway station north of the town of Bakersmill (standing in for real life Baker, LA). The Stable's experiment: to see what would happen with a split stable of 1/2 Zebra, 1/2 Pony, with separated living quarters but common areas. A reactor explosion causes a mass sudden evacuation in the middle of the night, and the survivors find their way to a plantation home eventually and turn it into a small settlement.

  This was about as far as the plot gets. This is also where a lot of elements used later start to show up: Stable 222 and its destruction is used in Peach Tea's backstory, but the stable gets shuffled up to an expy of Georgia, known as Peachtree, instead, and one of the side characters from Bakersmill, named Mama Praline, gets a reworking in later versions. An interesting part is something first written here that doesn't ever appear, but inspires later elements: a Griffon war train stuck on the siding by the railway station. At some point, Doc and his survivors were meant to visit with a group of griffon mercenaries and learn more about this train.

• Version 2 is a simple rewrite of the first version. v1 didn't get that far in concept, only about four chapters. v2 reworks a lot of the initial start to tighten up the Stable escape, and starts to lay some groundwork for what's going to be the working plot for the next few versions: After establishing the community at the mansion house, Doc and his companions would enter the city of Neigh Orleans and, after some questing, come up against a zebra named Kaskazini Nyota and his forces. I had wanted to toy with Lovecraftian elements seen in Point Lookout and in a lot of eerie swamp-based Southern Gothic stories, and as such this is the first time the idea of an amulet shows up. The plot involved a kind of genius locus for Martingale, implied to be the same or similar to the spirit that corrupted Luna into Nightmare Moon, and this spirit was sealed into an amulet and used by Kaskazini.

  This draft is where the griffon war train gets its first use. It was supposed to be part of a sequence where, with the help of Doc's team, the mercenary group would have repaired the train and used it for a running fight sequence through the industrial areas of town. This idea is still cool for me but alas I never really found a way to rework it. Another key scene that comes from this draft is a final story element that will weave through: the idea of a final fight where the main character uses an arcane energy weapon to shoot the amulet, which detonates and kills the villain. I really liked this scene, and it's the final fight of every draft going forward.

  Beyond that final fight, this is the first time Peach Tea is named as a character, as well as Kaskazini, though very little from this draft moves forward. I wrote maybe six or seven chapters of this one, and some notes, but never finished - a common theme throughout the drafts.

• Version 3 comes about after I decide to switch gears. I felt like having so many characters in the first draft, as well as a "home base", took a lot of attention from the city and the story, and that it would drag too much. I also got it in my head to try and write a villain origin story, so v3 sees Kaskazini take centre stage as a main character. He begins as an indentured servant on Wise Apple Plantation who escapes one night and tries to make his own way through the city. I'm missing a lot of the notes from this version, so I'm not entirely sure what the path would have been, but in the end it would see Kaskazini possessed by the Lovecraftian amulet and fight it out with Doc Bean. This is the first time Wise Apple Plantation gets a name, as well.

• Version 4 is a rewrite and extension of v3. The story is largely the same, but about this time I came to read about New Orleans Mardi Gras parade krewes and dubloons (the plastic beads thrown during the parade). I thought about what would happen if a group of post-war survivors found say, a krewe meeting hall full of dubloons in boxes. What would they think, and how would they interpret it? Think of the Kings from Fallout New Vegas, who find an Elvis impersonation school and don't realize what the reality behind it was. This idea gets spread city-wide, and Neigh Orleans being under control of various Krewes is first given form in v4.

  This is also the longest draft so far. I don't have it anymore - like most drafts, it was lost to time - but I know for a fact that I wrote at least ten chapters of it if not more. It was the longest running one by far, and also introduces some more elements that would later be seen in the fics: The Grand Equestrian Hotel shows up for the first time, as does Father Sunray and the Temple of the Celestial Sisters, and so does the idea of Radio Neigh Orleans being hidden away in a hard to find building meant to be Preservation Hall. About this same time, I took a very short (2 days only!) trip to New Orleans. It was not nearly enough, although the inspiration it provided was incredible - case in point, I had wanted very much to visit Preservation Hall itself as a huge fan of blues and jazz. Try as we might, we never found it... only for me to realize, all these years later, that we were just across the street visiting Rev. Zombie's Voodoo Shop (we were tourists, what can I say?). As a result, I decided it would be funny to hide such a key location in recent Fallout games - the radio station - in somewhere that was famous, but difficult to find.

  This story also sees a slight change in tone. I lost the notes, but I do remember at least that the idea here was to have Kas almost accidentally become the villain, where well-intentioned moves ended up gaining him the city's ire. Unfortunately, I simply don't remember how.

• Version 4.5 is a very slight rewrite of the previous version. Everything remains the same except for how Kas becomes a villain - instead of being a lone wanderer, he meets up with a companion and they travel together. They then become embroiled almost against their will in a civil war inside the Maisha Social Club: the head of the Club was possessed by that Lovecraftian spirit from before, rather than Kas, and there was a growing discontent. Kas and his companion are basically hired with the choice of helping assassinate the leader and become the fall guys for it, or refuse and leave knowing that they let a great evil continue. Their choice to participate in the coup would make the city hate them, and cause Kas to become a villain. Though I never return to this idea, it does still echo through with what Autumn does: Autumn's choice to involve the Enclave in the defence of the city is a net good in the long run but will cause friction in the short term, much as it does with Kas and his companion.

At this point, I shelve the story completely for almost a year. I was having a lot of trouble with these drafts, and a lot of trouble with making any of it work. One of my biggest problems was that, at the time, I was unable to write an effective POV villain character. Either I was making Kas too nice to be a realistic villain (and thus had to make it very arbitrary), or he was too much of a dick to be a likeable main character. At the time of these drafts - about 2015-2017 - I feel I lacked the skill as a writer to make this happen. Even now it would take work.

I'd been working on the same general bones of the story, too, which was rapidly becoming apparent that it just wouldn't work. It was frustrating to me, so I shelved the plan for a while before coming back from a different angle.

• Version 5 is the first of these stories not to take place in Martingale. It features Doc Bean as a character again, although now it sees him leaving the Stable freely and with one or two companions in search of a cure for a virus that's ripping through the Stable. It takes place in a Pacific Northwest inspired setting, and the main conflict comes from that setting: it would have been one of the last properly fertile areas left in Equestria, and factions were vying hard for it. One such faction was the Enclave, who kidnap Doc Bean and basically offer him an ultimatum: get the factions to agree to an Enclave takeover of the area, and he gets their full backing and support in finding a virus cure. Refuse and they let him go, but he's on his own for finding the cure. Sound familiar? I have a few notes for this story but no word of it makes it to paper, because of...

• Version 6, which comes to me in a flash of inspiration. It's not really a full version, because I have no notes and I don't think I wrote more than a chapter or two, but it involved the arrival of the griffon mercenaries - now known as the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels - to Neigh Orleans from the viewpoint of shy, quiet mercenary Renfeld. Though this draft collapses quickly, all the elements for the final Martingale Fairytale are in place.

At this point I'd been playing New Vegas with Arcade Gannon as a companion, and enjoyed that game's nuanced view on The Enclave - far more nuanced than a lot of the fandom takes in my experience. I decided to try something similar and scrapped v6 above and began writing again.

• Version 7 is our final version. It comes out of the biggest problems from the other drafts: Kaskazini as a main character is a Martingale native, and would know too much that the reader can't know yet. Doc Bean on the other hand, while an outsider, had far more important things to worry about than wandering and questing. I wrote up Autumn Breeze and took elements from v5's plot, reworking them as needed for Neigh Orleans. The Lovecraftian elements were dropped by this point, with me replacing that idea by a raider leader with self-aggrandizing ideals and a couple fake Alicorn Amulets. I was able to throw in other plot elements from other drafts as well as rework characters - Peach Tea was reworked into the draft as far back as v6 as a companion to the griffons and is kept that way here, Mama Praline gets retooled as a zoodoo spiritual leader, Kas gets retooled as a zebra Krewe leader, etc. There's no major plot rewrites from here, just typical editing.

And that's how we get to today. There's a distinct line of thought that takes me from draft 1 to draft 7, where are today. Could I have kept going on any one draft? Probably. But it wouldn't have been the same. There's parts that would be missing I feel. I still do miss some of the concepts, but they're never truly gone: I can always reuse these stories and characters again somewhere else. From where it started to now, I feel like it combines the best of every draft element, and while I could certainly improve things... I like it. And that's what matters.

That being said, there's a list of things that got cut from even v7. Here's a short, not even close to exhaustive, list of things I had to leave behind or missed the chance with:

Deleted Scenes

• • The Stable is gone. Stable 222 and its destruction make it in spirit as part of Peach Tea's backstory, but has been transposed to another location and isn't explored
  • The war train had to go. I wanted to keep it, I really did, but I couldn't work it in. I had an idea to have it blast through some raider lines, but in reality, I couldn't organically fit it in. It still exists in the world, just not as a story element – after all, the Scoundrels got there via train!
  • There was very briefly a paddleboat captain involved with the story. Delta Blues would drop the trio off at a swamp folk town where they'd be picked up by a paddleboat captain and brought back to town. It didn't add much outside of aesthetics

  • The idea of indentured servitude plantations was cut. I think it's worth exploring – I'm not the right author for it. I've been reading on the plantation system, but I feel it takes a defter hand than my current one to do this idea justice

    • Related to that is the problem of how long to dwell on it. Most folks come to Fallout for the cool post-apocalyptic world exploration – dwell too long in a single location, and it becomes boring. Rush it, and there's no point to the location. This is the driving force behind how often I changed tack on my drafts
  • A lot of inter-Krewe politics was cut. This is probably my biggest regret and if I ever write a direct sequel, or another story set in this universe or if someone else wants to write one, I wish I could dig more into this. I cut a lot of it for the sake of more organic flow, and do regret it a bit.
  • The Lovecraftian element was cut. I don't regret this one bit. I think it has its place, but not here. The idea initially was that this spirit from the bayou is responsible for the state of equilibrium for the area: the amount of raiders, the available food, etc. It also made the bayou a spooky place to be. I never quite got it to work, and I don't think it added much to it
  • Memory orbs in general area gone except, of course, for the Old Krewe segment. There were several backstory ones I had planned that talked about how the city was neutral ground and how that fell apart, but after String Bean stopped being the main character, it became harder to justify memory orbs for a zebra, a griffon, and a pegasus
  • Related to the loss of memory orbs is an entire sequence that I cut from the story. One of the memory orbs for the backstory that was still present in my mind until pretty much the writing of the Krewe meeting itself involved all three main characters - Bean, Kas, and Autumn - finding the ex-mayor's office of Neigh Orleans, and seeing the remains of a fight that happened as the city was washed in radiation. The orb would tell some backstory to how the city became neutral, but the last one was being recorded both as the naval attack was flooding radiation through the city and the mayor was being killed in the fight, causing a traumatic and broken memory orb. I wish I could have kept it, but there was no real organic place for it.
  • Several smaller towns were cut but mentioned, like Stalliondell (standing in for Slidell) and Bakersmill (Baker)
  • A lot of the politics around zebra/pony relations didn't really make the cut as much as I'd like, for a lot of the reason the plantations were cut: I just don't have a deft enough hand at the moment for such a topic, and it didn't really fit Autumn's story
  • Large swaths of the city go unexplored. I've only spent a very brief time in the real life New Orleans, not enough to really dig into it as a proper setting. I wish I could have, but I still managed to bring in some interesting spots I think
  • The idea of a group of survivors turning an old plantation home into a working community intrigues me a lot, but it just didn't work out. I might revisit it, but at a later date
  • Part of the original scenes involving Kaskazini really played on the supernatural side of things. In particular there was going to be a mansion that Kas used as a home that Doc Bean would have visited, but was revealed to be a strange place: somehow being able to take three right turns and be in a new hallway for instance. I kept the gist of it for the graveyard scenes, but the rest had to go
  • I wanted to spend more time in the bayou proper, but couldn't really find places to work it in organically, so I cut most of that out
  • There was a brief scene where Autumn went to get his mane cleaned up and have a chat with a character named Brightwork at The Grand, midway through Chapter 11. It didn't flow at all so the whole scene was cut out
  • The naval fight in the harbour was meant to have a bit more backstory but with my decision to cut memory orbs I also lost a lot of opportunity to discuss some of the deeper backstory lore
  • Related to that, Satchel Mouth – yes, the ghoulified Louis Armstrong pony seen briefly in Chapter 31 – was going to have a bigger role as a kind of backstory/expo character who told the main character – first Kas, later Autumn – about what happened on The Last Day, but I never found a good time to get Autumn to the station to meet him
  • There was previously a moment where Autumn did meet DJ Shorty sometime after doing the job for Red, but it was far too contrived and not at all organic – Red was going to basically cryptically mention it and Autumn would find it by accident

I'm sure I'm forgetting more. If I could recover some of these old drafts I guarantee I could dig more elements out that got cut or changed.

I hope it was an entertaining dive into the writing process and just how far things can change, and also how you can take old elements and retool them for later work. If I had to come up with Martingale Fairytale wholecloth, I would have had a much harder time writing it out than I already did. Being able to recycle my own previous drafts was an incredible boon, and I think that's something to take into consideration.

I'm no expert writer, but hey, I did it. And if I can do it - some nerd who's never visited their setting and never wrote anything before - anyone can.

Thanks for being along for the ride,

- Snowshoe