Second Try

I finished my revision of "The Mind's Retreat" a few hours ago, and I will be mailing it to Leading Edge tomorrow. I ended up taking the story from about 11,000 words to a bit less than 9,000. Even more impressive when you consider the second draft of the story was more like 18,000 words.

The reason it was originally so long was that I didn't have any real direction in mind when I was first writing the story. I had this character in mind, I knew a whole lot about his life, and I ended up writing the first draft of the story as a highlights reel of the first 20 or so years of his life. Hell, the first draft started with his Baptism.

As I went on, I started focusing more and more on the latter half of the story, which was really the story I wanted to tell. It turned out that the first 5,000 pages or so were nothing more than an overly-long introduction, so I trimmed that out. I kept parts as flashbacks, and ended up trimming that, too.

Eventually, with the draft I was working from today, I had shortened the timeline of the story from 20 years to more like 6 months. And most of that was transit time in Interstellar Space that went wholly unmentioned. With this copy, I realized that even that was putting too much reliance on flashbacks, so I changed one part into a dream that was more described than shown (and in about 1/10th the time, as well, without missing anything important), and adapted another into a record another character was watching. So that now, the entire time frame of the story went from 20-something years to about 24 hours. And it still tells the story I wanted to tell, and probably does a better job than before.

I think this draft is a lot tighter, and I think I'll stick with it. Until I decide to revise it again.

-E. Maxfield Moen