Work Room - Week 10

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

The results from last week are in:

and the new topic is up: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/894992.html

There is even a chance for folks to get back into the game: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/895399.html

and now I talk about the Lion King.

We went to see it last night. It was my Christmas present from Cynthia. They had never seen it before, I had seen it years ago, and had always wanted to take them. So, they decided to take me instead! :)

It was a lot of fun (and they enjoyed it), but one of the surprises was that "Morning Report" was no longer part of the show.

Apparently, it was cut (along with a total of 9 minutes) from the show back in 2010.

Which got me thinking about editing and the importance of being able to take a good, hard look at your own work and figure out how to streamline it.

In the case of "Morning Report", I loved that bit - but I know it didn't really do anything to drive the narrative forward. It was just sort of there as a funny bit. I definitely missed it, but I doubt anyone who has never seen the musical before knew there was anything missing.

What is YOUR editing process, what do you find yourself cutting out from your pieces - and how does that impact you when you are actually writing and notice something that fits the pattern of things that usually end up on your cutting room floor?

Comments

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

So, I have a tendency to write long.

(Cue everyone who knows me going, "Understatement of the century".)

I usually find myself cutting down on bits and pieces of things that just don't fit. I can write something and have all of this amazing backstory about this one character's motivations and what they're doing and why...and that will end up being scrapped, because it doesn't move the story along (at least not for those elements). It can be kind of frustrating, at times (to say the least...), because you write a line you really like or introduce something that you feel fits really well—but it's extraneous detail; you don't need to include it.

Take last week's piece, for instance: the focus of the story wasn't so much, "holy shit the dead are coming back to life!"—that was part of the background. (Whether or not it worked, well...that's a different story.) As I was writing it, I found myself coming up with these elaborate explanations as to why it was happening, asides that were hundreds of words long and talked about why the dead were back, how it had happened.

And...ultimately? That wasn't important. I had a very strong sense of who the narrator for the story was, and what they were doing and what was going on in their life that made the fact that the dead were coming back part of the background. They didn't care about the scientific side of things—that was me-as-a-writer, wanting to neatly explain everything.

When it comes to editing for Idol (I haven't done much of the other kind of editing my own work yet—just editing for other people), that's what I'm looking at—does it move the story along or not? Sometimes if it's a nice detail that builds character, I'll leave it be, but a lot of the time, what you're getting from me, for Idol, is a much shorter version of what was written—because in the longer version, the pacing is wrong, it lags in places and doesn't quite "work", and I've noticed that and tried to fix it.

[fodschwazzle.livejournal.com]

What is the most words you've cut out, by your estimation, in order to attain a final product? (I've watched you move some significant numbers. So many words perished in a fire of editing.)

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

I cut around 2500 from the piece for Week 7. I think that's a personal record.

[tonithegreat.livejournal.com]

That is impressive!