The silly shrinking story
Dec. 19th, 2009 04:50 pmThis is frustrating.
I have a novel I wrote a few years back. Shocking, I know :) It was on the long side so I spent some time getting it down to 120K words, cutting scenes and all that stuff. Eventually I declared it done and did the query agents thing with it. Towards the end of this process, I realised it was actually two stories. Two problems occur, let's find a solution, here's a resolution. So I could cut it two and that would give me room to develop the story world and characters better.
Of course, since finishing it, I'd gone on to write better and more interesting things so I put this other one on the back burner with thoughts I might get back to it one day. Turns out 'one day' was last Thursday.
Once I chopped the "second bit" off, I ended up with a 75K novel. So I started to read through it, looking for places where I could add in a bit. I'm about halfway now and I've managed to reduce the word count by a few hundred. Um.
It's full of "He wondered" and "He could see" and that crap which if why it's shrinking. I don't know about this "making it longer" thing though. Usually when I rewrite, the things naturally grow longer and then I have to go through and jump on them to make them smaller. I've had to deliberately make something longer.
Any hints?
I have a novel I wrote a few years back. Shocking, I know :) It was on the long side so I spent some time getting it down to 120K words, cutting scenes and all that stuff. Eventually I declared it done and did the query agents thing with it. Towards the end of this process, I realised it was actually two stories. Two problems occur, let's find a solution, here's a resolution. So I could cut it two and that would give me room to develop the story world and characters better.
Of course, since finishing it, I'd gone on to write better and more interesting things so I put this other one on the back burner with thoughts I might get back to it one day. Turns out 'one day' was last Thursday.
Once I chopped the "second bit" off, I ended up with a 75K novel. So I started to read through it, looking for places where I could add in a bit. I'm about halfway now and I've managed to reduce the word count by a few hundred. Um.
It's full of "He wondered" and "He could see" and that crap which if why it's shrinking. I don't know about this "making it longer" thing though. Usually when I rewrite, the things naturally grow longer and then I have to go through and jump on them to make them smaller. I've had to deliberately make something longer.
Any hints?
