Themeattics

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

I like to think there are two kinds of budding creatives: the ones that hate everything they make until they get to editing, and the ones that love what they make until they get to editing. I used to think I was the former, but it’s starting to look like the latter.

You see, Residuum has now officially sat around gathering dust for long enough. Strategic dust, you could say. I finished the manuscript… long enough ago that I don’t want to look so as to not beat myself up for the delay, but having a pretty decent length between finishing it and my own personal re-read / edit was intentional. I wanted to forget the nitty gritty of what I did so that I could look it over with eyes untainted by the glow of accomplishment. Turns out, that was a good choice.

Creating is hard, and there’s a particular feeling that comes along with finally doing it. For the people in my camp, it’s a mixture of accomplishment, joy, and a smattering of pride. The other camp probably looks at the end with consternation, fear, and a little disgust – but I’m not them, so I guess I won’t sit around and guess.

Back after I finished, I did read a little of it over. Some snippets here and there, if only to tell myself – hey, nice stuff, you. You’re actually doing it, high five. I thought pretty highly of it all. Time passed, and here I am.

Turns out, editing is an eldritch creature come to murder your little babies.

Residuum is… ambitious. The story it’s telling – that of ego, selfishness, duty, humanity, and existential terror – hinges on some extremely challenging decisions. And, frankly, I missed the mark in several of them. I know why I made the decisions I did when putting the story together, but upon review, my knowing doesn’t translate to making sense for the reader. Details of the world that seem as though they would be important just sort of fade from view. Again, there’s a reason for that – the book is set entirely from the perspective of one character, and he has actively chosen to ignore those things – but it feels wrong. Missing, like the ball was dropped somewhere along the way.

I’ve been keenly aware of two aspects of my writing for a long time. One, I’m notoriously slow. It’s clear in the prose where I was in my flow or where I’d come back from a break, but I expect that’s pretty standard no matter who you are. Editing is always going to be needed for these kinds of polishes. That’s all well and good. The real problem is two – I really struggle to rein in my word count.

The first version of Residuum clocked in at over 200k words. I tried my hand at submissions to agents and never heard a thing back from any of them, which sent me back to the drawing board. What, I asked myself (late, of course), are some industry standards I should be looking out for? Well, turns out that, for sci fi and a new author, submissions over 125k have to be pretty damn groundbreaking to even be considered.

Now, I think pretty highly of myself, but I’m no Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, or Iain M. Banks. I’m not taking the literary market by storm, so I figured I should do the bare minimum and fit to standards. Which left me with a daunting – one might say insurmountable – task. How the hell do you cut 75k words – 37.5% – of a manuscript?

I tried that for a while. Tried detailing places that could be cut, threads that could, plotlines eliminated, characters removed. Even with all that, I realized it simply couldn’t work. The original story was simply too big to condense, so I needed a new one. And that’s what I did. I threw out the original manuscript, kept the world and most characters, and went back to the drawing board. This version of Residuum was a personal challenge to myself – to write something under 125k.

And I did. Old habits die hard, though, and I’m finding that my pacing is off and things which should probably hold more of the limelight never get their time to shine. Too much time here, not enough there. Too much direction here, not enough there. Etc., etc. Not only that, the pitfalls of repurposing a story that you’d already creates is that, sometimes, you think you’ve given information in the new version that you never did. You write thinking the reader knows something they don’t, or that certain events still exist at all. All these little phantoms of a dead tale try to make themselves known and need to be exorcised.

So, exorcise them I will. There’s still a lot of reading to go and my note document is bloated as all get out, but this is just part of the life. No half-assing it and putting garbage to the market. I’ve got a story to tell, and it needs to be the best version of itself. Nothing less is acceptable.