Editing: "Finnegan's First Time"
Robert Heinlein's third rule of fiction instructs authors to "refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order."
Once upon a time, I submitted a spec-crime novelette of mine, entitled "Finnegan's First Time," to Bernard Schaffer's anthology Kindle All-Stars Presents: Resistance Front. I recently got the story back, complete with editorial orders. In essence, Bernard echoed a sentiment that my writing has evoked for a decade and a half: "tighten up." If I had a nickel.
But "tighten up" isn't "no thanks," and, of course, he's right. My prose tends toward a meandering, sometimes distracted, often hyperbolic style. It's inefficient. And to make matters worse, I've always been my own worst editor. So I took Bernard's suggestions, and I rewrote to editorial order. In the process, I wound up adding in a generous helping of my protagonist's backstory, because my dirty little secret is that this story is actually an excerpt from a novel that I conceived back in March of 2003 called The Man Who Never Was. That title is borrowed from an episode of The Dead Zone, but then the title of "Finnegan's First Time" is loosely inspired by the title of E. C. Bentley's 1913 crime novel Trent's Last Case with a reference to James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegans Wake. So now you know.
I had initially told Bernard that I wanted to cut about two thousand words out of this tale to turn a serviceable novelette into a sleek short story. I would still like to. But despite excising roughly three pages of extraneous material, I still wound up with a story of 8,301 words. The original version ran 8,653 words, meaning that I only managed to cut 352 words, or less than 5%. Of course, that's the net cut. My actual gross cut was probably on the order of almost 1,500 words, meaning that the material I added back in amount to about 1,150 words.
So even though I spent more than six hours editing instead of writing, I did still manage to hit my quota of a thousand new words for the evening.
Once upon a time, I submitted a spec-crime novelette of mine, entitled "Finnegan's First Time," to Bernard Schaffer's anthology Kindle All-Stars Presents: Resistance Front. I recently got the story back, complete with editorial orders. In essence, Bernard echoed a sentiment that my writing has evoked for a decade and a half: "tighten up." If I had a nickel.
But "tighten up" isn't "no thanks," and, of course, he's right. My prose tends toward a meandering, sometimes distracted, often hyperbolic style. It's inefficient. And to make matters worse, I've always been my own worst editor. So I took Bernard's suggestions, and I rewrote to editorial order. In the process, I wound up adding in a generous helping of my protagonist's backstory, because my dirty little secret is that this story is actually an excerpt from a novel that I conceived back in March of 2003 called The Man Who Never Was. That title is borrowed from an episode of The Dead Zone, but then the title of "Finnegan's First Time" is loosely inspired by the title of E. C. Bentley's 1913 crime novel Trent's Last Case with a reference to James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegans Wake. So now you know.
I had initially told Bernard that I wanted to cut about two thousand words out of this tale to turn a serviceable novelette into a sleek short story. I would still like to. But despite excising roughly three pages of extraneous material, I still wound up with a story of 8,301 words. The original version ran 8,653 words, meaning that I only managed to cut 352 words, or less than 5%. Of course, that's the net cut. My actual gross cut was probably on the order of almost 1,500 words, meaning that the material I added back in amount to about 1,150 words.
So even though I spent more than six hours editing instead of writing, I did still manage to hit my quota of a thousand new words for the evening.