You don’t only kill your children, you disembowel them…

A saying common among writers is that you sometimes have to kill your children, which means that sometimes on revising a work you have to remove or change things that you really like. Perhaps it’s especially because you really like them that they have to go. Anything that stands up to a writer and says, “Boy, I’m good” probably deserves to go, as it will unnecessarily draw attention to itself, disrupting the reading experience.

I started my intensive revision process on Missing Persons last Friday and have thus far had a good whack at the first sixty pages. Among those pages was a chapter that my agent thought didn’t need to be there. Ouch. An entire chapter? Gone? Just like that?

I looked it over and had to agree that he was right. However, within that chapter, there were a few snippets of information and some setup that I had to preserve. So, that meant going through the chapter and excising sentences and grafting them in elsewhere in the book. Harder than it sounds sometimes, because these grafts tend to stick out. Take a branch from here and stick it in there and it looks pretty darned conspicuous. This is an incredible learning experience.

Having removed the chapter, I discovered that I was left with two consecutive chapters narrated from the same character’s viewpoint, something that does not occur elsewhere in the book except when separated by a section break. So, to remedy that situation, I decided to invert the order of the next two chapters, which necessitated some chronology shifts.

Phew. Tiring work at times! Given that it’s taken me five days to revise 60 pages and the book is about 350 pages long, it’s going to take me better than a month to whip this puppy into shape…and that’s if I can maintain the present pace. NECON is going to bite out four days in the middle of work, and I have some heavy going later on in the book when I have to shift some really major chunks of prose around and try to deal with the fallout from those alterations.

Unlike with my previous two revision passes, this time I am sending the renovated text to my agent in sections — I e-mailed the 60-page update to him today. That way we can make sure we’re on the same page and that I’m keeping on track. We spent over an hour discussing the scope of the book last week and reached a pretty solid agreement about the nature of the changes that should be made to improve the book.

Thus far, I’ve removed a spleen and an appendix. Fairly minor surgery involving somewhat superfluous organs. I see major transplant surgery in my future, though, with a chance of rejection.