Cutting it Down
August 8, 2002
7:18 a.m.
Another good morning. I think I'm finished smoothing the first 200+ pages of the new cut of Stealing the Sun, and I've begun adding material as planned. It's been more work than I expected, and as a result I've expanded my writing time into the evenings to accommodate. That won't of course, last forever. Yesterday at work, I was collaborating with another person on a communication that is going to be presented to our company. We were editing down to meet the company intranet site's size guidelines (I think she accused me of writing War and Peace, but what the heck, eh?" "You're pretty good at this," she said as we sliced words. "I get a lot of practice." "That's right. You're a writer, right? Fiction?" "Yes. And on my last draft of any work, I make it a point to try to strip 10-15% of a story's length on everything I write, so I'm kinda used to this process." And so I am. I find myself doing that all over the place as I'm working on this book again. It's hard to say exactly how much of this work is simply slimming things down because I started by taking a huge hunk out of the middle. Still, I would think it's fair to say I'm taking 5-10% of the words out, hopefully without affecting the story itself. Now, you might ask, wouldn't it be easier to just write it that way to begin with? And to that I can only find one reply. Pfththpfththththththtth  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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