In Which Dr. Pretentious Takes up the Axe

[dr_pretentious]

Breva the Axe, the Barbarian Queen of Concision Revision, is the person who taught me how to knock huge numbers of words out of a draft by making tiny little cuts. She's got a good eye for lots of things, but she's always the first person I ask when I need to cull. When "Atlantis Cranks" was only about halfway done, I knew it started in the wrong place. She saw right away where the real beginning was. Three pages gone, right there.

At the moment, Breva the Axe is in Seattle on vacation, and one of these days some institution of higher learning will have the good sense to offer her a tenure track gig, and she'll move away, and then where will I be? I'll never be as good at baking, or as well versed in the Popol Vuh, or as patient with theories of postmodernity as she is. I'd better get as good at knocking words out of manuscripts, or serious trouble is in the offing.

It took me three days to do it, but I've cut the first complete draft of "Atlantis Cranks" down by more than 10%, to 25K even. The longest single cut: three sentences. Most of the cuts were just three or four words long. She'd have been faster. I'll get faster.

None of it felt like trimming fat. It felt more like exfoliating away scar tissue. Most of the words I cut were remnants of other sentences that didn't survive the production of the first draft. In a few dialogue tags, characters were agreeing with assertions that were no longer on the page anywhere, or doubting thoughts that nobody was thinking anymore, etc. Jane's still an abrasive personality, still judgmental, but kinder than I initially imagined her to be. Some of October's sentences understood the character badly.

Tomorrow, I'll see whether the remaining 90% still makes any sense. If it does, I'll proofread it backward to make sure I didn't introduce any new errors or miss any old ones. And then to the post office.

Tonight, I need to clear my own voice out of my head a little, to make those things possible. I think I'll settle down with newroticgirl's ms and give it the long second reading it deserves.

It'll be delightful to have finished something AND sent it out--lately, things are either sent OR finished, both of which conditions are, on their own, agonizing. And I'm looking forward to paying back my karmic debts a bit. I promised help with ritual texts to certain of you out there, and soon I'll be able to take a break from prose mind and slip into something more lyrical.

Speaking of karmic debts, Breva the Axe occasionally posts as mischievouspie.

Comments

[wombats.livejournal.com]

Somehow, Ray Bradbury was in charge of writing the script for the movie, "Something Wicked this Way Comes" (well, it makes sense, he wrote the book, but any other details of why escape me) and so he came up with some massive script that the copy editor read and said, "Wow, Ray, this is absolutely fantastic! I love it. Although, it is a bit long. Do you think you could trim a few thousand words from it?" Now, mind you, the original screen play he crafted was ... 50k words? long enough for about a multi-hour movie. So, Mr. Bradbury said that he whined and complained and screamed about how precious each word was but, in the end, he shaved it down. The copy editor loved it, but hey, could Ray just trim a bit more. Repeat. By the end, the movie was at its 95 minutes and some rather low number of words. Mr. Bradbury was actually quite pleased with the result but noted that if someone had told him to trim it one pass and down to the size it was supposed to have been, he'd have said they were crazy and would have refused to do it. However, his sly copy editor cajoled him into a series of nice little cuts that pleased him and improved the story. (I like the movie quite a bit, as well as the story. IMDb is a bit less kind, giving it a 6.5.)

I guess you could say this is encouragement for you :) Good luck.

[newroticgirl.livejournal.com]

I'm also a fan of the cut a little here and there school. (Though I weilded a ruthless axe of my own when trying to slenderize C&tD!)

Looking forward to your comments! (Hope my stuff on Atlantic Cranks was useful...)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

My mind boggled a bit when I looked at my calculator and saw that I had to cut it by more than 10%. Following Breva's method took the sting out of it. Since a page has 22 lines on it, and the dialogue makes for a fair bit of white space, I only had to average about 2 lines per page of cuts. It took me two passes to do it, cutting about one line per page on each pass. I kept track of how many lines of cuts I was behind, with little tic marks on the first page. And the cuts only had to add up to approximately one line, not consist of one contiguous line.

A few pages were entirely unscathed, and some gave up their two lines in scattered one-word increments.

Think of it as Nanowrimo in reverse. I thought of Chris Baty's riff on giving your protagonist a two word name--Carl Henry instead of just Carl--so you gain a spare word every time you mention him. At one point, I realized I'd made an egregious geographical error, and put the town of Sea Bright on Long Beach Island, when in fact it's on Sandy Hook. Can you tell I've never lived in Monmouth County? Really glad I caught that before sending it out. Anyhow, Sandy Hook is two words, Long Beach Island is three. Woohoo! At five occurrences, I just cut five words.

The thing I couldn't do with this story was cut the cast. Everyone who appears on stage is there for a reason. If you can cut the cast, that's what gets you the big word count cuts. That's actually the reason the big book will never get down to 100K, and it's the reason I was so ruthless about cast size with the Nanowrimo project, which must not exceed 100K.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Can you imagine a film production company having that much patience with any author now? Even a writer of Bradbury's stature would be shuffled out of the process the moment he submitted that first overlong draft.

But yeah, it is encouraging to think that scaling work down that little bit at a time is a process that can be scaled up to a much longer work.

Oh, and good to see that your renovations are coming along.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Very helpful! Tomorrow, I'll be turning my scrawly markup on C&tD into something coherent and electronic.

[newroticgirl.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I appreciate the help... I've been waffling back and forth on how to handle C&tD for quite some time... a second pair of eyes will (hopefully) be just the thing! :)