Progress Report, Jan. 17

I've just performed a chapterectomy on Henderson—cut chapter 10 and much of chapter 9, for a total of almost 5,000 words from a manuscript just 32,000 words long.

Fairly drastic, but I realized I'd succumbed to what you might call the "Woolf Syndrome." Virginia Woolf was famous for having problems just moving her characters from the drawing room to the dining room. In my case, I had Mike leave the lab to try to absorb the implications of what he was doing and thinking. But he went back to his apartment and into a long and unpersuasive dialogue with his "tenants"—the subconscious minds he shares his brain with. Then he took off on a visit to his ex-wife, and it felt completely phony.

So Mike's going to stay in the lab where he belongs, and he can sort things out with Mr. Choi and the other Koreans before Espinosa finally moves in and arrests him.

While it took me a long time to get out of this particular blind alley, a 5,000-word cut isn't nearly my personal best. One Christmas Day a few years ago, I cut about 20,000 words from a 75,000-word manuscript. It was a plot strand that wasn't going anywhere and didn't have any connections to the rest of the story. It was the right thing to do: the rest of the story needed almost no changes to compensate for the loss of the strand.

Then I faced the need to replace the lost 20,000 words, but somehow the story itself had lost its attractions. Some day I might go back and tackle it again; it's a bit dated now, very mid-90s, but it could work in the post-9/11 world.

Well, let's get poor old Mike Henderson back on his feet again before we try reviving the dead.

Comments

[susan]

Wow, that had to have taken guts. As much as we hate to think of word count, it's almost like a measure of progress that keeps us going on. It takes a pro such as yourself to be able to take a huge slice out of a story for its own good.

[Andrew]

I just stopped by after reading about your blog on Liam's Feeding Change. ALready I have read many useful and interesting things.

I just chopped 5,000 words for one section of the book I am working on, and 3,000 from another section. The problem with that is that I should feel good - they were redundant parts of the story and the book is way too long anyway. Instead I feel like it gives me license to not worry about my own word limit targets. So I end up adding alternative plot lines which bump it back up to nearly the original number of words...

[Crawford Kilian]

I agree with Susan that word count is a kind of progress, and cutting a big chunk can feel like a step backward.

However, some of the material I cut may return in slightly different form a little later in the story. Also, as Andrew points out, a redundant section (or sentence, for that matter) doesn't deserve to live. Everything in a story should advance or enrich the story; if not, out it goes.

And we can feel perfectly free to fill up the gap with new material...as long as it's contributing something to the story.

[Joel]

Ninjas. Throw in the shadow warriors and the rest of the novel will write itself. (And if ninjas don't work, monkeys. Everyone loves monkeys ;-)