Re: word limits and revision

Sea Wasp wrote:

Carole McDonnell wrote:
On Apr 26, 11:43�pm, Lucy Kemnitzer <rita...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There are markets for shorts that really truly don't want anything
over 4K words. ?This is not a relative limit, but a hard limit. ?I
have shorts which are under 5K words. ?I'm thinking about taking the
big pruning shears to them, but they're stories I like as they are and
I wonder if that kind of treatment will hurt them. ?But currently
they're not finding a home, which hurts them more, right?

Would you cut nearly 20% of a story to fit into a word limit?

Lucy Kemnitzer
still


I am totally convinced that most stories can be cut without harming
them too much.

There's "cut", and then there's "seriously cut".

20% cut is nontrivial. It's one word in five removed. It's reducing a
10,000 word story to 8,000 words.

I would not do that unless I, personally, thought that the story was
bloated and needed cutting to begin with.


I might be able to do it - my default style is quite prolix, and I have one
or two fairly terse ones up my sleeve.

Thing is, though, there's a *reason* my default style is as wordy as it is.
It would be quite possible to keep every single event, at the same time as
removing two-thirds of the reason for reading (or writing).

The last short story I was working on had a lot of One Damn Thing After
Another in it, which is not good short-story wise, and so I seriously
considered slimming down the plot. For whole minutes. Unfortunately, that
would have destroyed the tone, sabotaged the real dramatic tension, and
totally vitiated the conclusion. Naw.

After a first, essential tightening -- for stodge, abortive plot-lines, and
unintentional redundancy, mainly -- what I'd do when faced with a word
limit would be to look for something that *could* be excised without too
much damage; do an experimental draft with it gone; and repeat until
successful coming up empty. In my case, however, I'd also be likely to
come up empty quite quickly, since once I've written a detail in,
everything else has a tendency to start putting roots into it. I'd quit
and look for a new market at that point.

On a related topic, I also find it... nontrivial... to get a told story to
come back to life on me once I start in on heavy modifications. Retelling
it as if by a different narrator helped me get through three radically
varying versions of _The High King and the Women and the Sun_ in a fairly
short space of time; but the fourth and/or publishable version never did
get finished, and it hasn't been for lack of trying. The plot appears to
be suffering from narrativium fatigue, or something. Ditto, even more
strongly, the Faerie King yarn, which has been knocking around for ten
years chewing through trees without ever even completing a draft. I
suspect I've just had to rework around one plot failure too many, and I
don't have an accurate sense of 'what really happened' any more.

Avoiding this happening to the WIP is one of the reasons I'm sitting here
rasfcing instead of writing. I've reached a stage where the activities of
all the major characters in the fields we know start accelerating, upping
stakes, and generally crashing into each other -- much of it behind the
scenes. I just know that if I plonk down stuff wherever it's most
convenient to the visible plotline, I'm going to lose my bull***-detector,
and end up having to attempt a partial rewrite. Instead, I have a tedious
while of repeatedly writing up notes on the situation as I see it from the
standpoint of all the secondary characters, until I've worked up a
plausible set of responses to the situation that puts the stuff that needs
to happen in the right order. *Then* I can depart from that ad lib if I
have to; but working from a vacuum that way is one of the things that got
me into all that trouble with the Faerie King, and I have no intention of
repeating it. Still, it's Sunday, so I should be able to make a fair dent
in it, in between cleaning up the hog-pen.


--
Cheers,

Gray
.