When I worked as an actress, I once met a film editor who
said rather mischievously that in the movies, all performances were made or
broken in the editing suite and that he could sabotage an actor's reputation
with one flick of the razor blade (this was in those long-ago misty,
pre-digital days).
Although I didn't agree with him at the time, with the
wisdom of years (I wish) I can see how the same might be true in fiction
writing. It's easy to think of the blank page as the writer’s challenge, but in
many ways, the real test comes when you have completed your first draft. You have gathered together all your raw
material, and now you have to work out how to shape it. You may find you have
to do some character work -- flesh out some details here, change the emphasis
there -- and almost certainly you will have to polish the structure, perhaps
deconstruct and rebuilt it entirely. In
between the first and second drafts of the novel that I am working on at the
moment I added 10% to the length, expanding the back story and adding
greater drama to events in the present, and it gave me a real sense of
satisfaction.
Imagine my surprise on reading Stephen King's excellent book
On Writing to discover that his
formula for a successful novel is 2nd
Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.
Minus 10%??
Is he serious?
I’ve worried away at the idea since then, and I think he
probably is.
As well as adding detail in, you do need to take a great
deal of flab out. Read with a critical
eye, entire scenes, whole paragraphs and countless over-embellished phrases
could be dispensed with. So I'm going to
set myself the challenge. At the moment
I'm dealing with notes from my agent that will almost certainly involve putting
in additional material, but when I've done all that I'm going to go down the
Stephen King route and see if I can take 10% of the total out again.
Watch this space…
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