Stories are a way of life

 Well.

I'm starting to suspect that I'll need to not only write new material (to add and expand different character plots) but also completely rewrite certain scenes. Not because the scenes are bad, per se, but because it doesn't work in the story anymore.

For example, I re-reading Chapter Three (of my, uh, third or fourth rewrite) and there's a very nice scene between this brother and sister character. The only trouble is that the way the story is arranged now, they wouldn't be together at the start of Book 1. I'll probably still use the scene after where the brother finds a ring belonged to his mother. But the other one doesn't really fit anywhere.

Which isn't really what I'm talking about.

Okay. So in this third/fourth rewrite, one of the MC's had a cousin. There was a subplot about someone getting into trouble and needing a place to hide. This leads said character to try to move into the cousin (and her mom's) home. But that cousin has dropped out of the story. And the character who gets into trouble has (far as I know) moved into a different subplot. So the scenes relating to all that has to no place in the story either.

Dang. That's not exactly what I mean. Basically there's a lot of scenes that have no function.

Ah!

A better example is a scene were two characters meet in an antique shop. The original scene is written from one character's POV, but I realized that using that POV doesn't make sense. That character is a tertiary character; I'd rather write the scene from the POV of the MC in the scene. So I'll rewrite it. Yeah.

The other thing I discovered while writing story snatches is that my main MC's biggest tension (in the first Book, anyway) comes from his friend. That probably doesn't convey much, but it was very important thing to realize, since it allows me to map his actions and choices (some of them a bit spiteful) better. And that's like really important to me.