I’ve started editing the novel I write several years ago, ‘The Double Act’ and as usual I have read it through again, doing what I think of as a ‘light’ edit, correcting spelling, grammar and punctuation errors, putting in words which have inexplicably gone missing, cutting out obviously extraneous stuff…. Extraneous stuff, usually my stories are full of it and I hack through the undergrowth of excess verbiage as if I was going through a word jungle with a machete… In ‘The Double Act’ this seemed to be rather more like light pruning… Why?
As I read the story,particularly when I got to the second very dark half of the story I became more and more engrossed in it, and found I was reading it for its own sake, not as an impersonal, distanced editor and critic. I was carried along by what happened to Genet and her friends and to Dr and Mrs Herrick, at first their tenants then their friends. No! No, no, no! I should be cool and detached,I should be like an eagle drifting above the herd of speech and description, plunging down to eradicate the weakest, I shouldn’t be in the thick of the narrative, gambolling with the characters and following the plot!
I must employ my usual techniques, reading it aloud, reading it backwards, slashing and burning, paring and pruning… except in this case I must be aware that I’ve just read it through almost indiscriminately because I wanted to know what was happening, that I was pulled into it, not because I liked it so much or thought it was so good!
Lois Elsden 