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The Cutting Room Floor — George Garrott
“The Cutting Room Floor” highlights some of the characters and scenes that got cut from my books during the editing process.
No matter how well you plan a novel, sometimes you write a scene that you end up having to let go of. In my blog series, “The Cutting Room Floor,” I’m going to share some of these deleted scenes. My hope is that doing so will let me breathe a little life into these characters and locales that, otherwise, would just molder on my hard drive, never to see the light of day.
That’s what happened with George Garrott, a supporting character in my first draft of my second Danny Diamond novel, Old Flames Never Die. I liked him. He was a good character. As what would have been the first named Black character in the series, he would have brought some much-needed representation to the traditionally whitebread world of hardboiled private investigation.
But he had to go.
That was because, as great a character as he was, I didn’t need him for the resolution of the story (I was still trying my damnedest to keep the novel a novella). So he was just kind of there, a…
