Editing: Craig Stemford’s Imprisonment

Six weeks after first completing this work, I read it back and I thought it was dreadful. I still had my recollection of what I thought the work was like, the impressions of it that had remained with me from when I’d completed it, and the work I read now seemed greatly inferior.

I think there are two things going on here. At the time of writing, what I see in my own mind is the vivid images of the characters, situations and dialogue as they first appeared in my mind. These images are so vivid that they probably seem more real to me than real life does. And, six weeks later, when I came to read the cold words, these seemed much less vivid. In fact, I thought “Who would want to read this dreary nonsense?” or something along those lines.

It is sobering to leave your work aside for a few works, while working on other stuff, and then to come back to it. It is then that you, as a writer, stand the best chance of seeing your work as most readers will.

After I’d got depressed over this, and looked more closely at the opening pages, I thought that I could see the problem. On my first read-through, I did find that the story picked up and became worthwhile in the last two thirds of the story. The long description of the relationship between Craig and Dicky, I felt was quite engaging. At that point, Craig seemed to be in real peril, the deepest sort of peril, because the peril was psychological. And peril of a sympathetic character is usually what drives fiction, makes it interesting and rewarding.

So, the problem was with the first third of the story. When reading it, I could see lots of passages that weren’t necessary and needed to be deleted. I did the work, left it overnight and when I read it back the next day, it all seemed ok. In fact, I now think that the opening is good, and I’m proud of the story as a whole. But when I look back at the changes now, I didn’t make any massive cuts; there were only two main passages where I reduced the paragraph by about six lines. The changes mainly involved ‘tightening up’ the writing: removing any words that aren’t strictly necessary, and that don’t add any new content, or seem to simply repeat content that is already there.

I think the changes, though perhaps small, have made a big improvement in the story. Or perhaps that’s just me? Don’t know. Do let me know what you think.

For anyone who’s interested in comparing the two versions, I’ve saved the first draft and marked the passages where I’ve made cuts:

The first draft.

The final draft.

After completing the editing, I thought about the story and a flaw occurred to me. Craig’s impressions of Andrea’s personality are not portrayed in the story. And since a large part of the story is about him meeting her and then deciding to split up, it seemed a large flaw that I hadn’t directly mentioned his perceptions of her. So I’ve added a paragraph just before the point when they split up. This is included in the final draft, above.

I would, of course, be interested to hear if you think the editing has improved the story.

 

19 June 2008