First Revisions: I Have To Delete An Entire Section of My Book?
Good morning readers, I hope your summer is as productive as mine has been. I do have to say this is probably the most productive I’ve been in years, and it feels great. Sure, it can be stressful and tiring at times, but overall, it keeps me motivated and happy. Today I wanted to tell you about my experience with revising Fallen Ribbon the first time I finished it. And yes, I did in fact technically finish it multiple times, or at least, I thought I did.
I think I completed the first draft of the book in 2014 and that was the first time I printed it out for myself in a solid 8.5”x11” brick. It was so incredibly long. I finished the first draft at over 160,000 words, separated into three parts. By this point in my life, I was already a new mother and had spent my previous summer before my senior year of high school a part of the Boston writer’s group, Grubstreet. There are many programs to help writers reach their full potential at Grubstreet so I decided to take advantage of one of their programs where a published author would take a look at your piece and give you constructive criticism on what needed to be worked on and how to get it ready for publication.
Well, the advice she had to give me wasn’t what I was expecting at all. The biggest takeaway of our sessions together was that the novel as a “first time novel” was too long. I learned that a common practice in the publishing industry is that most first time authors are highly encouraged to keep their first novels under 90,000 words, especially if they don’t know the genre. Thankfully, I didn’t have to worry about not knowing my genre because that was a predetermined idea/goal from the beginning. I’d always known that I was going to write in Urban Fantasy/Supernatural Fiction. The challenge came from knocking back 160,000 words to under 90,000. It seemed impossible at the time.
The author, who was also an experienced editor, recommended me to focus the book on one location. In the initial writing process of the book, I made it so Geordie and Matt travel from Massachusetts, to California, to the Immortal Realm, and then to Massachusetts again. She noted that I had a good hook with the Immortal Realm where the true story conflict would really make headway, but a lot of the travelling in our world was seemingly unnecessary. I wasn’t 100% in love with the idea of it, but it did sound like good advice and the idea grew on me over time, so I started with that.
I think about less than halfway through trying to re-piece together the story so that Geordie and Matt didn’t have to travel all the way to California to make their way into the Immortal Realm, I became curious about something. This was while I still wasn’t in love with the idea of removing what I believed, at the time, to be a vital part of the story. I wondered what the original document would tell me if I just removed the entire third part of the story instead, for the word count. I figured Part 3 of Fallen Ribbon had felt really rushed when I wrote it and it felt like it was missing a lot, and I overall just didn’t enjoy how it turned out. Keep in mind, this was also during the period that I wanted to make the series five books long. When I deleted that section, I cut and pasted it into a new document to set aside and discover it brought down my word count more than enough to meet a publisher’s expectations. I was both surprised and elated!
The funny thing was I had already made so much progress on removing the California parts of the book and had spent so much time stitching up the story accordingly, that by then, I felt like there was no turning back. Another change I decided to make was removing one of the character perspectives to focus the story on a smaller group of people. I will delve into that more in a different blog post, but regardless, it went from six perspectives to four. In my experience writing this story, I have concluded that four perspectives are the perfect number to adequately tell this story. I didn’t need more than that, and I am hoping that won’t change in the future installments.
And there you have it, I managed to reduce Fallen Ribbon from a whopping 160,000+ word count by eliminating an entire section of the first draft. As I mentioned before, I did cut and paste that final part into a new document to be used later. I decided to make that part its own book so that I may expand and improve upon it once I finish Fallen Ribbon. So, my series, later named The Dark Nursery Diaries, went from five books to six books. I’m honestly excited about this factor because it gives me room to delve deeper into the lore and background of the universe that I created for myself.
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