The big chop

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working intently on making some revisions my editor had requested to the third book in the Cassaforte Chronicles. (Its former title, A Traveler to Nascenza, has been shelved, by the way, in favor of The Nascenza Conspiracy.)

For those of you who read The Glass Maker’s Daughter, the third book in the series focuses on Petro Divetri, the younger brother of the first novel’s heroine. After spending four years of increased scrutiny and expectation thanks to his sister’s fame and connections to the the country’s ruler, Petro is tired of constant attention. When he’s selected to represent his insula on a religious pilgrimage, he and his best friend decide to play a practical joke by swapping places. Petro gets to be a nobody for the course of a couple of weeks, while his friend gets to enjoy all the imagined privileges of being the glass maker’s son. But then everything goes wrong when political insurrectionists wishing to put pressure on the crown kidnap the friend, believing he’s Petro Divetri, and Petro’s left alone in the wilderness to stop them.

The book’s really a play on a familiar theme these days, that of a political group utilizing tactics of terror in order to frighten a population away from a popular leader. It’s a story of the extremes to which a political minority will resort when their candidate doesn’t assume a nation’s control—though I don’t necessarily think any of the young adults reading the book might pick up on the Obama vs. the teabaggers parallels, any more than they picked up on the echoes of 9/11 in the first book.

My wise editor enjoyed the book immensely, but made the suggestion that moving the kidnapping forward in the narrative would benefit the book’s structure. I didn’t disagree. What it meant, however, was that a lot of material needed to be cut. As any author can tell you, cutting can hurt. The chunk of pages I wanted to remove represented not only days and days of work, but great conversations, vibrant minor characters, detailed descriptions, and all kinds of information that might have to be relocated to other places and woven back into the novel’s web. Cutting substantially is not just a matter of lopping off a number of unessential words and hoping it adds up. It means judging every sentence, every paragraph, and deciding what’s essential and what’s merely colorful.

It’s hard.

I did it, though. In the end I chopped about thirty pages from the first one hundred. The first chapter I left more or less intact save for a little streamlining. From the second chapter I chopped the second half. The third chapter that originally took place with Petro and some of his insula-mates became a much shorter episode that took place in the headmistress’ office, and all of Petro’s classmates vanished. (That was the loss that stung the most, probably—a couple of the kids were really nicely drawn.) The fourth chapter I left alone, but the fifth, detailing the pilgrims’ first night on the road, I excised completely.

Although on a certain level I was a little sad to lose my minor characters, mostly I thought it a great intellectual challenge to figure out how to accomplish it. It was like a big game of Jenga. I removed as many sticks as possible to lighten the tower, but not so many that it lost any of its integrity, much less had any chance of tumbling down.

It’s unwise for a writer to think of his novel as untouchable. There’s always something that can be improved or polished. Sometimes an editor is going to make a request that sounds difficult. Approaching it as a game, however, or as a particularly tricky puzzle to solve makes it less daunting. Even fun.