Monday Mood: Nothing is Wasted

Finding new life in your scrapped plans.

By: Violet McCleod, Madeline

Best intentions and well-laid plans still have a way of going topsy turvy, no matter how carefully you strategize. Characters, deals, story arcs, collaborations, and sometimes entire projects get left on the cutting room floor.

Sometimes, that loss feels like relief. Other times, it cuts deep. Those are the ones that linger — the ideas you walked away from in search of calmer waters, even though part of you still wonders what might have been if you’d just found a way to make them work.

But the truth is, those ideas never really leave you. Whether you keep a folder of fragments in Scrivener or carry them around in your head, they have a way of resurfacing. The stories come back in different shapes. The partnerships may not have worked with those people, but there’s always someone else. There’s always another chance. That goes for the plans you fumbled, too.

Ember & Ink is the result of several failed initiatives and company attempts. What makes this one different is that I’m not doing it alone. I’ve got a community surrounding me. People who can weather the hard times, the scary times, the “I don’t know how I’m going to make this work” times.

We understand that the work comes when it can. In the meantime, there are volunteer projects, shared conversations, and open creative spaces on our server. It’s a playground for makers and storytellers, a place where lost ideas can find new life.

I built this place from scraps, and they have my utmost respect.

I do my best to keep my cutting room floor reasonably bare. I spent most of my first few years of musical composition casting aside most of the ideas that didn’t yield immediate results. It wasn’t pleasant; every musical draft I left aside felt like a tiny, isolated failure on my part to bring an idea to fruition.

In 2023, I developed what I affectionately refer to as “the gallery,” which is a coded and itemized system of musical sketches in all sorts of stages of completion. Instead of a title (I hate to waste them if unnecessary), each sketch is given a code along the lines of TL02, CE01B, DD01, and so on. For the sake of brevity, I’ll refrain from explaining how exactly the coding system works, but some of the first ideas I sketched out under this new initiative, three of which are listed above, ended up being used in an audio drama the following year. 

Many of these “gallery” sketches are inspired by specific tones, characters, or scenes within a project, but since I prefer to save and nurture as many ideas as possible, they are not steadfastly assigned to specific projects until said projects reach production stages. The reason that I refer to the collection of songs as a gallery is that I often shop unused ones around to creators that need music for their projects quickly and succinctly. If someone quickly needs a theme for a main character, then even if I find it to be a day on which I’m drained creatively, I’ve got a few ideas already lined up that I can present to them as options to expand on. The same goes for ambient or background tracks, action cues, and so on.

“Behind the Shadow,” originally named DR05, is one of these pieces. This theme was chosen at a sketch stage by Theodore Powers for their “Doctor Who: Starlit Saga” fan series as the main character’s theme, so it was given a full orchestral overhaul as well as new, contextualized lyrics. It’s one of my personal favorites to have ever come out of this initiative, and it started as a small idea, born from nothing, that has now gone on to receive four separate variations within the project and become a musical mainstay within the series. Had I written today’s song a couple of years ago, it may have been discarded after the first minute didn’t resonate with me. 

I see absolutely nothing wrong with leaving plans on the cutting room floor by any means, I still do that plenty of times within a project or creative writing session. However, I believe that it’s worth looking back every so often to make sure nothing important gets left behind. Whether a creative thought is initially appealing or not, it’s still a brand-new, sparkling idea; maybe a bit of new life is all it needs.

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