Paksworld

In order to free up some wordspace for what needs to be added,  something had to come out.    Several somethings, in fact.    Does this mean you, the readers, lose out on some deathless prose, some priceless nuggets of literary excellence?

Alas (alas, because I wish I wrote nothing but deathless prose and priceless nuggets, etc), no.   You are instead being saved some yawns and annoyance, as the excised bits were neither necessary nor sufficiently decorative.

How does this happen?    Why can’t I write nothing but deathless prose, etc?    I don’t entirely understand it, but here’s one thing that happens, as in the several pages cut out last night.   When I’m working on a complicated bit of action, I’m working things out as I go…seeing them in my head, writing them down fast.   Sometimes that’s not what happened after all.   Sometimes, caught up in recent research, I put in every tiny detail rather than the necessary details only.

The passage cut is clearly that (and besides, I remember writing it.)    Someone falls into a trap, a mechanical trap, and in figuring out how it would work and how much space would be necessary for the mechanical parts to function, I added more and more complexity, beyond the logic of it all.  Those who set the trap would not have needed all that complexity…they did not have to worry about catching the person trying to rescue the one in the trap, because of where the trap was placed.

My explanation of how it worked (which ropes and chains did what, where the gears were)  and especially of the added complexity, lessened the impact of the trap itself–on the reader, though not on the victim.   But even worse was the essential wrongness of the description.    It was not merely tedious; it violated the deep logic of this particular story.

The good lines in those two or three pages have been put back in, and they have much more punch when removed from the sludge of excess description.  Immediately the story-stream flowed forward.

Another bit of chopping dealt with half a conversation, unresolved and unresolvable.   If nothing plot-worthy comes from it (and it was clear by now that nothing would), out it goes.

Along the way, lesser snips have come into play, as described last spring for Oath of Fealty.     Unnecessary passive voice sentences have been kicked into active.    Better verbs replaced slack ones, and adjectives and adverbs vanished.  (Not all, of course.  There’s a place for passive voice, adjectives, adverbs, and just about any construction you can think of…sometimes.  Even “the.”)

So it goes, and as it’s now just after 8 am, I’d better get back to work.