WRITING: Lessons from editing

In a previous post I spoke about the difficulty of editing one of my longer pieces into something shorter for an assignment.

It ultimately started when a friend read it and told me her focuses that I shaped the edit around. I had several trajectories of where the story could head based on what would be cut, but I'm glad the direction it took based on her objective feedback.

Unfortunately, this meant cutting my first scene entirely. There was far too much description and detail, and (while I love it and still do and think there's nothing wrong with it,) for this short-short story format it wasn't really necessary. In the process I learned a lesson about writing a beginning. When I was first writing it, I went back to add the extra detail scene because my main character's felt too artificial, like they didn't arrive there at the same time or something. In the re-write/cut it was far more natural, since the story was completed and I knew what the characters would be accomplishing,.

I ended up keeping all the elements that were important to me: the plot, side plots, and a random tangent. I learned that a reader won't know what I cut, what was changed from the older versions. While I do appreciate the detail I ended up scrapping, it's taught me a lesson on what's really required to write a story. It doesn't take much, really, just a character and a problem. All that detail I created can be added to the wiki.