Editing Can Suck
When I wrote my first publishable novel—Panda Bears From Mars—I thought: That’s it; I can do no more. I mean, it was based on a screenplay that had immediately earned me an agent. There were some things that had to change, of course, like the film’s opening on a black screen with dialog that was intended to sound like the original Star Trek cast. Can’t open a novel on a black screen. Duh.
Pulling the novel out of the drawer—it was really a folder—was enlightening each time. I kept finding myself thinking ‘Seriously? I thought this was the best I could do?’ And back to the word processor I’d go again.
I have no idea how many times I rewrote the opening chapters. Over two dozen times, I’m sure. Just in one year of edits, the opening sentence of the novel morphed from this:
A veritable United Nations of alien life-forms shuffled, stalked, or hopped out of Charlie Masters way as she stepped clear of the turbolift.
to this:
Alarms thundered throughout the Melanti starship E’n’arueth as it approached the planet on which, for better or for worse, its journey would terminate prematurely.
to this:
“Damn dog is lucky it’s still alive,” the ship’s doctor grumbled. “Who’d want to poison a dog with apple seeds anyway?”
to this:
Charlene “Charlie” Masters elbowed around two Sith comparing homemade lightsabers in the midships corridor and jogged into the cruise ship atrium.
Better? Or simply different? You can get all kinds of advice on how to open your novel, from your critique partners to sundry novel-writing courses. Open with action. Introduce the protagonist then present a mystery or hook to keep the reader reading. Prologs are okay. NEVER open with a prolog. Even Kurt Vonnegut offered—in one of his eight rules of how to write a good short story: “Number 5: Start as close to the end as possible.”
Can you introduce your protagonist near the end of the story? I don’t know. In the final version of the novel, I wrote this opening:
The dozen bathrobe-garbed Jedi battling crimson-hued Sith in shorts and flip-flops barely rated a passing glance. Charlie Masters shouldered her way through the melee. What did she expect from a science fiction convention at sea?
Originally, though, it took another page to introduce the secondary main character and 20 more pages before we catch a glimpse of the panda-like aliens.
In the final version, the aliens attempt to shoot the protagonist with tranquilizer darts in paragraph three, and the secondary character is introduced halfway through the first page.
The secondary character is based on a famous—maybe infamous—writer, and the character tries to explain writing to the attendees of his lecture: “Writing is hard, people,” he said finally. “No, it’s harder than that. Get a job. Live on minimum wage. Hell, lose the job and work for food. Have people pity you and toss you small change. Then you might understand what it’s like to be a real writer.”
Okay, that’s pretty cynical, but writing is hard. Maybe it’s not the initial flow of words that is difficult for you, but assembling the novel into an enticing structure that keeps the reader interested in turning to the next page takes practice. And a lot of editing. I’m never going to be another Steven King, Isaac Asimov, or Agatha Christie, but I do have stories to tell, and I’ll keep trying to polish them until people want to read them. I hope you stay focused on your craft, too.
