I’m planning to enter Meet the Veals
in a short story competition, the Bridport Prize, in May, and this has
meant I’ve had to shave off about three-hundred words to get it beneath
the 5000 mark required. It only took three edits to get it down, and
it’s shocking how much you can shave off a story without really trying.
All I’ve taken out are odd words and phrases, and about two sentences
that were basically repeated elsewhere in the story. I didn’t remove one
word that made any difference to it, and yet I’ve managed to get rid of
a hell of a lot of them. The new version is up now and reads a lot
better, I think. I tried to follow George Orwell’s advice that “if you
can cut a word out, cut it out”, probably the best piece of writing
advice I can think of. I think I need to go back and re-edit all my old
stories; I seem to use the word “that” a magnificently pointless number
of times.
In other news, I’m working on a new
short story, a dystopian apocalyptic sci-fi kind of thing, then I’m hoping to can
writing shorts for a while and work on my novel.
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