Editing

I have been trying to learn the art of editing and come to difficult conclusions, though the first is simple enough. Any first draft, especially one written by me, will require pruning. And the same is true of any second draft. After that the issues arise.

It is surely inefficient to write a great deal which later needs to be excised. Although this seems obvious I'm not sure it is. The excess may well mean that the author has fully realised character and scene for himself, which is desirable. If some of that work is later withheld from the reader it may still have a beneficial effect on what remains.

Another issue troubles me a lot. I have heard it said that we live in a digital age, which I took to mean an age where things happen rapidly and attention spans are short. The speaker implied that we remember this in our writing - that we don't hang around, that we keep things moving. But if we write and edit with this in mind we might end up cutting too much flesh from the bone.
Who wants to curl up with a skeleton?

A spare, lean style can be very effective, but is that the only style open to us now? Can't we be expansive any more? And are digressions out of the question? I hope not. Yet I notice that some queries are doomed from the start on word count alone. So I would guess that if an author wants to be expansive these days, he/she will only have a chance of doing it when established.
____________________________________________________

Musical Notes
Normally, we edit to improve a text, but sometimes the desire to edit can be problematic. It can happen that an author or composer edits compulsively and doesn't know when to stop. Henri Duparc was a case in point, being unable to leave a good song alone. On other occasions the problem is one of quality control. Cases of this include Brahms, Paul Dukas and Jean Sibelius.

Early on in his career Sibelius doubted the quality of his work, withdrawing Kullervo soon after its first performance. He had well known problems with the violin concerto and the fifth symphony and felt that, even after heavy revision, the fifth symphony was not entirely successful. He also had doubts about Tapiola.The worst case was the eight symphony, on which he expended a great deal of work before burning what there was of it - evidently a great deal. There is no way of knowing if his instinct was right about the eighth syphony, but I believe he was correct about the other works.

But maybe he took it all too seriously. He could have adopted a more relaxed attitude, done his best with a given work and left it to listeners to decide. Many imperfect works are enjoyable. Why deprive us of pleasure because you take yourself too seriously? Renoir didn't. He kept painting after arthritis weakened his technique. The art market hated that, but why would he care? Painting was what he did.

Self Indulgence in Writing

Many agents and publishers will come across this, where the writer can't bear to leave a passage out and is indulging him/herself because it should be excised. A friend described this to me using the old cliché about not wanting to kill your children, though I don't think this is a helpful image.

But I believe the problem can occur at the other end of the spectrum too, where the author is so well established that the editor doesn't try to edit out, or does try and gets knocked back.

A book I have in mind is 'Until I Find You' by John Irving, and I should say at the outset that this problem has nothing to do with hard work. The author is far from lazy. My edition of the text is 820 pages long and Irving wrote it twice. The first version was in the first person, but his wife persuaded him that it should have been written in the third and he rewrote it (mostly successfully, though tiny outcrops of first are still detectable).

Why is the book so long? The first section (125 pages) tells the story as the child Jack understands it. Unfortunately, he is being lied to by his mother and ends up many years later retracing his steps in an attempt to figure out what had actually happened. So the same sequence of events is narrated twice, once at the beginning of the book and again at the end. Telling the same story from different viewpoints isn't uncommon - Robert Browning went over the top with this technique in The Ring and the Book, and who reads that now? - but it is surely difficult to bring off.

This is not the only reason why the book is so long, but it is the single most important. Some time ago I attempted a detailed analysis of this title on Goodreads, but it was rejected because it was too long. I pared down the review and it was rejected again for the same reason. What I ended up posting was a shadow of what I had written. The one and only round to Irving!