The Scene I Have to Write

A public domain image at left of a first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays. Image hosted on wikicommons.

I'm sure it happened to the bard. There are scenes don't work well in the end and are cut or changed or mashed into some other scene.

We have to write them in the draft.

I call it "hamming it up" -- where there seems to be a payoff scene I want so badly to write but I know that in the end I'll probably cut or re-craft it to a fraction of what I desire to compose.

I have a story about a Madoff-style grift in action. We never see the end as the payoff in the story is a relationship change between two principal characters. 

For years, each draft included the beautiful explanation of the intricacies of the fraud. The story suffered for it. In the final draft, the fraud is just a passing thing described as if a baseball game. There's "Tiger's won 2-to-1 in the eleventh" and there's the detail description of every pitch in the last three innings.

I find scenes I have to write. I have to get them out. They're close to the pitch-by-pitch business above.

I hope now that on the "second pass" I will clean-up all this indulgence because I know when I start out on the page the first time that I'm wasting the ink.

These scenes make us happy. I at least have to write them. They encourage the longer work.

I wonder at what scenes Shakespeare "had" to draft that he later discarded as indulgent?

I wonder if he had any? Did he tell himself the story over and over until he'd pared down all the fluff before he took up the pen?

I'd like to know.

He paid more for his ink than I do mine. Did he place a higher value on committing it to paper?