The quickest cut

Photo: @markusspiske

In a previous life, I worked as a magazine writer and editor. On trade magazines and local magazines (Top 10 things to do on the May long weekend), and for a while on a fine art magazine. And one of my favorite things to do as a magazine editor was to chop the ends off of articles.

I would slice last paragraphs off my own articles, and off articles written by other people. It was very rare that a piece couldn’t be improved by this near-indiscriminate trim. You would almost invariably be losing that “conclusion”, that school-essay calibre wrap-up that would be stuck on the end by inexperienced writers (myself very much included). The zingers, the perfectly crafted end-notes that in my mind left readers nodding in awed understanding of everything that had come before. Endings, as I learned, were almost always better without them.

As I’ve recently discovered, you can also make a similar, even more drastic, chop off the top. I’d like to say here that I have no problem killing my darlings. I may have hundreds of thousands of words that were excised from this novel over time. Most of them terrible and nonsensical, but some of them crafted with great care. I can lose these well-loved scenes without a glance backward and move on. What I have a harder time with is seeing clearly what I can cut in order to tighten up a scene, to improve pacing and keep readers interested.

I spent months trying to find a transition between my opening scene and the action that sets off the story in my novel. I had set the scene, rewritten it and reshaped it, felt that it did well in establishing who my characters were in relation to each other. But it was boring as hell. I bored myself, working on it, and couldn’t imagine that anyone would read it with interest.

So, I cut it, about the equivalent of a full chapter, and jumped right into the action. And that’s it.