Editing: The Price to Pay

Two years after first completing this story, I looked at it again and did two rounds of editing on it. I managed to reduce its length by 177 words.

The passage beginning “I glanced at the image on the screen”.

Once you start reducing all text to its minimum, so that economy is the prime aim in editing, passages such as this one risk being chopped out completely, since its character, and the original intention in writing it, was to use time and rhythm to portray a particular sense or feeling, or atmosphere. At first, when editing this passage, I was thinking “economy”, so the original content of the passage risked being thrown out; it was invisible while looking at the passage purely from the “economy” point of view. But when you put aside narrow editorial aims and just read the words (as most readers would do), then the true content reveals itself, content which would be deleted if the passage were edited from an “economy” point of view alone. So, for these reasons, I agonised over this passage. In the end, I have left it not much changed from the previous draft. Most other passages in the story have been edited from the “economy” point of view.

First draft

Final draft

A file with all the edits between the first and final drafts marked

4 November 2010