{"id":7708,"date":"2019-01-16T07:42:21","date_gmt":"2019-01-16T12:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7708"},"modified":"2019-01-16T10:21:06","modified_gmt":"2019-01-16T15:21:06","slug":"resurrection-on-the-cutting-room-floor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7708","title":{"rendered":"Resurrection on the Cutting-Room Floor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"scissors,
(photo: Guzm\u00e1n Lozano, creative commons license)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The first draft of one of my novels was 135,000 words\u20141.5 times what was remotely saleable. Since I didn\u2019t plan on writing solely for myself, I couldn\u2019t risk being thrown in the circular file before my doorstop even reach an editor\u2019s desk! So I began to cut. In the many subsequent drafts and rewrites, I\u2019ve always had one eye on shrinkability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When my editor\u2014the stellar Barb Goffman\u2014suggested I beef the novel up in some areas, I knew we weren\u2019t just talking addition, we were talking subtraction too. A number of characters were easy to jettison altogether, but a few that had to be trimmed still spoke to me. The three most promising I\u2019ve turned into published short stories, something J. Todd Scott may have done with a character from High White Sun<\/em> (a short story in, I believe, Mystery Tribune<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One character I didn\u2019t want to lose is a murdered Roman priest\nwho thinks his classic migraines are communications from God. Although his\ndeath remains in the novel, his backstory is repurposed in \u201cThe Penitent,\u201d published\nlast year in Bouchercon\u2019s Passport to Murder<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A mafia fence launched his career by masterminding the 1990 Isabella\nStewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston, a resume-enhancing crime unrelated to events\nin the novel. That story became \u201cAbove Suspicion,\u201d appearing in the current\nissue (#26) of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another priest, Anglican flavor this time, intervenes in an\nassault on my protagonist, no doubt saving her life. While this priest has only\na minor role in the novel, his giddy nonstop talking charmed my beta- (or\nperhaps I should say gamma-) readers, and I worked him into a story\u2014\u201cWhat Saved\nThem\u201d\u2014published in the U.S. 1<\/em> Summer\nFiction issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The transformation from novel excerpt to complete short\nstory turned out not to be as easy as I expected, and each presented its own\nchallenges. If you\u2019re ever tempted to resurrect one of the darlings you\u2019ve just\nkilled, here\u2019s what I learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four Tips for Authors<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. If the characters involved in the short story remain in\nyour novel (that is, if you haven\u2019t gotten rid of them altogether), you need an\neagle eye for continuity. You can\u2019t have your character driving a Porsche in\nthe story and relying on Uber in the story. More important, they cannot do<\/em> anything in the story that would\naffect the action of the novel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Originally, I\u2019d engaged in vigorous head-hopping in the\nscene where the priest dies. I found I could park the novel\u2019s point of view in\nthe head of the assassin, yet write the short story from the priest\u2019s\nperspective. Same events, two points of view. That was fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. The story of the fence had a strong core from the get-go\nbecause of the extensive detail about the ISG theft. I wrote new backstory\u2014waybackstory\u2014about\nthe character\u2019s childhood in Fez. And of course more extensive setup and\ndenouement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. OK, it\u2019s fun, but is it a story? The Anglican priest was a character. His story had to be developed from scratch using the dialog I\u2019d salvaged. But who was he? How would he behave? What changed for him? The rescue of the woman would plausibly have a long-term impact on him and it became a source of reflection, laying the groundwork for his<\/em> subsequent actions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because you don\u2019t have a blank page when you deal with bits excised from other works, there are many more than the customary limits on your degrees of authorial freedom. Whether the resurrected short stories prove useful in marketing or whether they are just good stories in their own right, you can feel good about creative recycling! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first draft of one of my novels was 135,000 words\u20141.5 times what was remotely saleable. Since I didn\u2019t plan on writing solely for myself, I couldn\u2019t risk being thrown in the circular file before my doorstop even reach an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Resurrection on the Cutting-Room Floor - turning editing scraps into new short stories. It can work!\n","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,120,29],"tags":[492],"class_list":["post-7708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-short-story","category-writing","tag-writing-tips"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Converted_file_113499d0.jpg?fit=640%2C427&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-20k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7708"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7710,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7708\/revisions\/7710"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}