I Have Stories To Tell! Episode The 13th

Girl Howdy and howdy to the boy who is lovingly misogynistic in his fantasies while portraying the dutiful partner in the here and now, and welcome to the urban jungle that is hosted by G.B. Miller, where swinging from the vine is the preferred method of travel these days...so long as you don't get electrocuted in the process.

Last week, I mentioned a couple topics of choice that I wanted to talk about in some upcoming posts: cliches and throwaway scenes. Granted, because they are two of my favorite tropes to use in my stories, it made it that much more difficult to choose. But choose I did, so for today's post, we will talk about throwaway scenes.

Basically, a throwaway scene {IMO} is where you have a momentary lull in action at a particular point in a story and you need to fill it with something that is just barely connected by some sewing thread to the overall story. By "barely connected" I mean it has almost zero do with the overall story but it's used as an example for that particular scene that it appears in.

Confused? Well, don't be. The rest of the post will {hopefully} clear up any confusion you might have.

I have one such throwaway scene in book #1 of "The Friendship Trilogy". It fits perfectly for that particular transitional scene but has almost nothing to do with the overall story, and now I will elaborate on how this throwaway fits with this particular scene.

In general, I like writing about certain aspects of religion. Specifically, I like exploring the concepts of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory with my writing and this book is no exception, with roughly 97% of the story taking place in a particular section of Purgatory. To get even more specific, I like poking fun at certain types of religious people.

Take zealotry for example.

I've always had a certain fascination with religious zealotry for as long as I can remember. Although I haven't experienced it (fortunately) on a personal level, I have read about it extensively as well as watched it in the movies over the years. So with this particular scene needing something that would be somewhat commonplace in the late 19th century (specifically, the American West in the late 19th century), I wrote a roughly 1 1/2 page encounter between my MC and a somewhat unbalanced religious zealot.

Because this was Purgatory, this encounter made sense in a strange way. I briefly turned my MC into an Angel Of Death, hell bent on revenge, who ultimately recruited this p.o.s. of a zealot to spread the word of her arrival.

Now, you may be asking yourself, how is this a throwaway scene?

For starters, it didn't start out to be a throwaway scene. It actually started out as a chance encounter that my MC had with an old man after she had asked a question about the condition of a building that she was in only moments ago. But it quickly deteriorated from there (because I got inspired) as the old man suddenly dropped to his knees in terror. The proceeding paragraph will give you a taste on what kind of tangent I decided to go on.

The gnarly old man fell silent, but only for a moment as the realization that he might be in the presence of The Angel Of Death hit him like a two by four.

"Good Lord sweet Jesus in Heaven! It's you!" cried the man as he dropped to his knees clasping his hands and swaying his body in fervent emotion. "The day of reckoning is upon us! The vileness of this town will soon be purged by this Angel of Death! No mercy for the wicked and depraved! But mercy for the good and righteous!"

And we basically stayed like this for the remaining 1 1/2 pages of the chapter. I originally wanted to explore this a little further for an upcoming confrontation but decided instead to let it hint at a possible nefarious and useful tangent. Which, ultimately, came for naught, as it simply became an interesting example of who and what was inhabiting this particular slice of Purgatory. No more and no less.

If you want to look at it in another way, think of a throwaway character that briefly pops up in order to help move along a specific snippet of a scene, then disappears and never is heard of again.

Tune in next week as we tackle the trope that is the bane of all seasoned writers and is incorrectly embraced by newbies: cliches.

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