/discovery-drafting

Cutting Dead Ends

Discovery drafting produces dead ends: subplots that stall, characters who arrive and do nothing, mysteries that turn out uninteresting. Cutting them is the job — but in a bible-tracked project, cutting has bookkeeping.

Recognizing a dead end

A thread is a dead end when it meets two of these:

• It has not advanced for two consecutive chapters despite appearing.
• Removing it changes nothing downstream (no promises depend on it, no character's arc needs it).
• The writer's interest in it is gone — and the reconcile loop's post-hoc notes say so explicitly. "Might be useful later" without a concrete plan is hoarding, not craft.

Distinguish a dead end from a slow burn: a slow burn has a planned payoff recorded in continuity/promises/ with a target chapter. If the payoff exists in the ledger, the thread is alive — leave it.

Cutting procedure

1. Decide with the user. Cutting is a story decision. Present: what the thread is, where it appears (chapters/scenes), what depends on it, and the recommendation (cut, fold, or keep).
2. Choose the cut type:
   • Cut clean: the thread never mattered. Remove its scenes' claims (or leave the scenes if they do other work) and mark its promise, question, or clue status: abandoned with a reason. Deleting the ledger file drops the record story continuity uses to skip ordering.
   • Fold: the thread's best element survives inside another thread (the interesting character joins an existing subplot; the clue becomes part of the main mystery). Record the fold in both threads' notes.
   • Prune: keep the thread but strip it to a single scene or mention — it becomes texture, not a thread.
3. Bookkeeping (this is the part people skip):
   • Mark removed promises/questions in continuity/promises/ and continuity/questions/ as status: abandoned with a reason — never just delete them. An abandoned record explains to future agents why the setup has no payoff; a deleted record looks like a forgotten setup.
   • Update affected scene records' state-changes if the cut removes a change other chapters assumed.
   • If a character is cut, set their file's status: cut and leave the file in place. story reindex rebuilds characters/_index.md from every character file, including status: cut, so the cut stays in that registry. Drop the character from casts, relationships, and arc characters lists.
   • Update plot/timeline.md for any removed events.
4. Run maintenance: story reindex ., story links ., story validate ., story continuity . — the checker should confirm nothing still references the cut thread. story continuity warns about a status: cut character still in a chapter or scene pov or characters, an arc's characters, or a relationship.

The darling log

Keep a ## Cut Threads section in the project's notes (or in continuity/state.md if the project prefers) listing every cut: what it was, why it was cut, where its pieces went. Cut material is compost — a folded character or a pruned subplot often returns in a later book. The log is how the later book finds it.