Re: Revising a first novel ten years later


"Catja Pafort" <green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1hwrggk.1xp50k0iun5etN%green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Patricia C. Wrede wrote:

You want more of this, you're gonna have to wait. I have to
get the lawn mowed.

Grow a meadow, mow twice a year.

Around here, it'd be prairie and I'd probably need some sort of special
waiver from the city. Especially since part of the maintenance is burning
it over every couple of years.

That line was part of the original post -- at the moment, we're still in the
season known in Minnesota as "Almost Spring," and the grass isn't growing
yet, so no mowing. But I gotta get out and rake one of these days...

You convey admirably how the reading experience is so much much better
when the words work hard. It's not that the first version was dreadful,
but in the second you manage to pack the same story in - but in
tightening, you have space to put in more, which enhances the reading.

Some of it is that there's more; some of it is that it's the *right* more.
Describing the road and the riverbank and the caravan approaching the city
was a lot of stuff, but it wasn't the *right* stuff, i.e., it wasn't
actually terribly important to the story I was telling. In a different sort
of story, it would have made for a classic zoom-in omniscient opening. (But
it could still probably have stood cutting -- a page and a half of zooming
in is a *lot* in a 274-page book).

And the other is that this post shows how one can keep the essence of
the story (and even enhance it) while changing almost everything about
it.

The characters and the plot didn't change at all; the macro events (caravan
arrives in city and starts unpacking; two guards have conversation, then
leave for the castle that's home to one but not the other) don't change.
It's a matter of focus.

Very thoughtprovoking. Thank you.

You're welcome. And welcome back.

Patricia C. Wrede


.

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