52 Card Pickup

Edits on the Music Novel continue apace. Jen is still bushwhacking, and she’s a handful of chapters ahead of Kent who is smack dab in the middle of the novel, doing more precision pruning. We’ve already passed the arbitrary word removal goal we set for ourselves, and it looks like we’ll have no problem shrinking the book by 10% by the time we’re done.

There are several approaches you can take when you’re editing, but you’ll get the most bang for your buck by finding big things to remove, like redundant scenes, superfluous characters, or even distracting subplots. Kill your darlings, as they say.*

The Music Novel has no superfluous characters or distracting subplots (because we’re awesome!), so we were left with routing out redundant scenes. And even those were hard to come by. There was only one scene that we removed entirely.

Since we like to present ourselves with challenges to keep our environment interesting, we took a good hard look at a series of scenes that occurred back-to-back and involved the same three characters. “These scenes are each individually spectacular!” we cried. “Nary a one is expendable! But surely there is a way to streamline the sequence!”

And lo, we were correct. By chopping those chapters into little pieces and throwing them all up in the air we were able to reassemble the components into a more pleasing shape. The pacing is better, tension escalates in a really effective way, and we saved ourselves 1200 words. Huzzah!

*no actual darlings were harmed during the production of this novel