The Passed Note Issue 2 October 2016 | Page 12

The scene below is in the latter category. It’s cut from an early draft of Daughter of Deep Silence, my latest young adult novel. I conceived the book after staying up late at Ally Carter’s house watching back-to-back episodes of Arrow and Revenge. I went to bed that night trying to figure out what fascinated me about the two shows, and boiling it down to three things that I then mashed together into a single plot: being lost at sea, hidden identity, and cold, calculated revenge.

In Daughter of Deep Silence, Frances Mace takes on the identity of her dead friend Libby in order to exact revenge on Senator Wells, who she thinks is responsible for the attack on a cruise ship that killed her family and left her stranded at sea as a teen. Her desire for revenge is complicated by her feelings for the senator’s son, Grey, who she met and fell in love with on the cruise.

Though the following scene no longer exists in the final book, it laid the foundation for Frances and Grey’s characters, their relationship with the past, and their tangled feelings for each other. It’s a moment where Frances falters. She thinks holding on to revenge makes her stronger, when in reality it just leaves her broken and weak. Once I understood this about her, I was able to infuse those elements into the rest of the book.

This scene had done its job and ended up in the cut file along with so many others. Over the years I’ve learned that just because a scene or a line doesn’t make it to the final draft doesn’t mean it’s not critical to final product.