As a writer, I like to finish things—more than finish them, I like to whip things into marketable shape. On the one hand the psychology of this is obvious; as I’m fond of saying, you sell exactly zero of the books and stories you don’t finish. My legacy on this world is going to be my writing, so the more of it I can publish and get seen, the better.
On the other hand my obsession with finishing things and extracting some sort of publishable value from my writing goes beyond simply practicality, and I’m not sure where it’s rooted in my life. All I know is, once a work gets to a certain bulk, I’m determined to make the effort of writing it worthwhile by finishing it and then polishing it into something that might, conceivably, get published.
One side effect of this obsession is an eagerness to try new techniques or crazy ideas. I get super excited with experiments that might lead to stronger material—experiments that go beyond polish and revision. One example is when I Frankensteined two failed novels together to make one great novel (something I discuss in detail in Writing Without Rules). Another is something I just mentioned on Twitter last week: Boiling a novel down to a short story.
The Great Compression
I’ve been planning to submit a story to an anthology, but wasn’t sure whether I wanted to write a fresh story to match the theme or see if I had something already in the can that would work. I realized that a novel I completed last year was actually a perfect fit, theme-wise. The only problem? The antho had a word count limit of 6,000 words and the novel was 63K+.
This novel has a long history. It started off as a short story I wrote in the early 1990s; I really liked it but could never sell it anywhere, and so a few years ago I started trying to work it into different formats, eventually ending up with an unsatisfactory novel last year. I still thought it had great potential, so the story was still alive in my head, but it wasn’t right.
The idea of trying to cut 90% of the story? Exciting. Like, thrilling. I love stuff like that, extreme challenges. Could I excise most of the novel and still have the core of it?
It was dismaying easy, actually. Dismaying, because it implies that 90% of that novel was just bullshit I poured in there to bulk it up, something I expressly advise people not to do. My only defense is that I didn’t bulk it up on purpose. And I like a lot of the writing I deleted. In practical terms, one reason the story was easy to compress is the structure I used in the novel—it has three timelines, so step one was simply to choose the timeline in which the main, core story occurred, and then delete the others. Just like that, 50% of the words were gone.
Next, I compressed characters. In a novel you can be subtle and granular with your characters. In a short story every character has to be essential. So I eliminated characters whose roles could be passed on to other people. That took care of another chunk of words.
All of this work took me: One day. And I had a story that was still coherent at about 9,000 words. The rest was shaving and shaping, and I really like the story I ended up with at 6K.
Is there a lesson here? The only lesson, I think, is that it’s worth it to push yourself, to try crazy things, to go beyond NaNoWriMo and see what you’re capable of. I can’t swear I’ll sell this story to this anthology or anywhere else. But it was fun to do this, and ultimately successful.
For my next trick, I’m going to try compressing an entire weekend’s worth of drinking into one night. I may not survive. You may not survive. But someone’s got to try, dammit.