Revision 3

Just this morning, I finished Revision 3 of The Gatherer. This is such an accomplishment, on so many levels!

The original word count was 409, 113. E, bless her, has read every single one of those words more than once. She's a major fan of this story. And that's a lot of words. My goal was to reduce it to under 300,000.

Well, my real goal in editing was to tell the story without any redundancies, verbosities, unnecessary repetition, or wordiness in general. (In other words, my aim was to make it the exact opposite of that previous sentence, did you catch my joke?) And in the process, I hoped to reduce it to under 300,000 words—which was a lofty goal, considering that was a reduction of over 25%.

I am very happy with the results. I feel that I did, indeed, tell the story in the best way I know how. I streamlined the text and took my expression to a higher level of efficiency and elegance. I cut out scenes that were unnecessary back story that the reader doesn't need. I cut out other scenes that added nuance and depth, but the reader could live without. (And the fact that I originally wrote them means that the nuance and depth is still there, woven into the story behind the scenes, where the reader won't know about them but can appreciate their influence on the end result.)

I took good and made it better, and I'm really proud of that. The more so because in order for that to happen, a writer has to be able to get past the initial phase of being in love with their own words, a phase that tends to entrap them indefinitely, until something happening to alter their viewpoint. To quote Jude Law as he played the writer Thomas Wolfe in the movie Genius, "I hate to see the words go!!" 

For me, what snapped me out of that phase and into a different perspective was a simple interaction I had with L, when I asked for a few minutes of editing help on a particular scene. Some of his suggestions for the scene were helpful, but more importantly, his approach to it made me see that there was another way to express what I was saying, a way to streamline it, maybe drop even just a word or two here and there to smooth things and make them flow. But dropping a word here; a phrase there; a redundancy you didn't even realize was repetitive until that particular time you read it through... Over the course of a 400k+ word novel, that really adds up.

This is the revision I would happily give to an editor, if I can find one, because this is truly my best foot forward, the best I can do on my own. (There are probably a few typos, but D is reading it—and loving it, as I knew he would if he could ever make the time to dive in—and he is a fabulous copy editor, so he will catch most of those.) This is the best story I know how to tell, short of an experienced third party stepping in and standing the thing on its head (to which I am open).

And the final word count? 298,984. That's 73% of the original. That's a reduction of 27%!! It's still an "epic novel," still longer than the longest Harry Potter book.... but not as long as Charles Dickens' Bleak House. 

I don't know that this is the final phase of metamorphosis, but this is a thing with wings. 🦋

I so proud. 😊