So, Claire liked the revised manuscript… but we weren’t quite there yet.
Most of the new comments were about specific, individual lines or bits of scenes… But she had one large outstanding comment about the pacing in the second quarter of the book. The difficulty was that she felt that some scenes were too long – but they were ones that we both agreed were really well written.
It’s very hard to cut material – or even cut it down – when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it line-to-line. But, even if everything in a scene is good, if it isn’t doing the book as a whole any favours it has to go… or, at very least, it has to get shorter. It’s a real wrench doing that sort of editing; it’s hard enough to cut words when you know they aren’t right, but cutting ones that, in themselves, are…
I have two little tricks for making it easier. First, I always save a new file every day so that the ‘old’ version of what I’ve written is never lost or deleted: the work, and all the effort behind it, is there should I ever decide it could be of use. Second, I keep a running file of ‘cuts’. Out come individual words, little phrases, clauses, entire sentences, paragraphs, scenes and even complete chapters… But they come out of the manuscript and find a new home in the cuts file, where I have them to use elsewhere should I ever need or want to. I rarely go back to these files, but that’s not the point. The point is to feel that I’m not ‘wasting good’: I’m not throwing away effort, let alone work that is worth something.
So, pinning Claire’s comments to my monitor, I set up a new cuts file and went back to the manuscript and was even more ruthless than before. ‘What does this word/phrase/sentence add?’ I asked myself. And, even more importantly, ‘Could someone else have written this line?’
I tried to cut the purely descriptive material in my ‘slow’ scenes down to 200 words or less. It wasn’t always possible, but it was a useful rule of thumb to work towards; 200 words is less than a page – hard for a reader to get bored in that time or feel that the pace really has dropped, but beyond that…
The other thing I did was look at my book outline (a screenplay-type scene-by-scene structure) and consider the order of my scenes. ‘Does this really have to come before that?’ I asked myself. ‘How many scenes from other subplots can I insert between the ones that are part of the ‘slower’ part of the story?’
Simply swapping a few scenes around made a huge difference. Changing the rhythm of the story, and widening the weave between the different story-threads, was enough to fix the pacing in a number of places… And with some strict but not too harsh cuts, it was enough…
Or at least I hoped it was: off went the book to the ever-patient Claire once again…
Before I get to what she thought, does anyone have any good tips to share about making difficult editing easier? How do you cope with cutting the bits you love when they don’t serve your book as a whole?
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