Hello, dreamers. This post is both a new feature and the resumption of one of my most popular regular posts. Years ago, while completing final edits (or so I thought) of Wide Horizon, I made a series of posts on editing. I received a lot of positive feedback, which was surprising. It was also slightly disappointing; at the time I joked with friends that readers seemed more interested in having me talk about my writing than actually reading what I wrote.

But as I’ve continued fleshing out my slate of monthly “Thursday Features”, I decided to bring back “On Editing”, now named “The Cutting Room Floor”. And this month, I’m going back to where it all began: Wide Horizon.

Wide Horizon, Narrowed

As my longtime readers will know, Wide Horizon was the first novel I completed. In fact, it was one of my earliest works; I’d only written a handful of short stories before I looked at my novel concept in 2013 and thought, “Yeah, I can write this.” It was arduous: writing the first draft alone took the better part of two years, interrupted by an almost year-long hiatus. By comparison, my first draft of Pioneers, written in 2018, took roughly eight months.

After writing and editing Wide Horizon, I sat on it for a long time. Put simply, I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with it. Wide Horizon was completely unlike any other story idea I had, then or even now. By the time I wrote “The End”, I was eager to get to work on the Dotiverse. I’d spent years working on background notes, and frankly I was happy to move on from a long-standing project that had been, at times, a slog.

Eventually, I put WH on Amazon, feeling it needed to be out there somewhere but querying with it would be disingenuous. After all, I had no plans to write anything else like that; no sequels, no spin-offs. I knew I wanted to spend the remainder of my writing career working solely in the Dotiverse. The chapter of my life spent with Braylen Roads and his crew had been closed.

So I left it out there, for a long time. I had a few people read it. Everyone I knew who read it enjoyed it. Over time, I came to hold a dim view of the novel. After all, it was my first work of any significant length. It was also so different from anything else I’d written: it was brooding, dramatic, playing fast-and-loose with the science while getting by on mystery and intrigue. The stakes were immeasurably high, the bad guys over-the-top. Those who read it and enjoyed it tended to prefer fantasy to science fiction. But over the years, I began to feel I was unduly harsh on Wide Horizon. I felt my opinion was clouded by the simple reality that it wasn’t the sort of thing I enjoyed writing at this point.

Then, in January, I committed myself to fully-editing Wide Horizon.

And I realized this novel was a mess.

From the start, I’d known Wide Horizon was, too put it mildly, lengthy. The first draft tipped the scales at nearly 200k words. And I’d rushed through the ending not only because I wanted to be done already, but because I’d grown increasingly self-conscious about the length. My first edits shaved roughly 16,000 words of text. More was shed over subsequent edits. But it was still incredibly, unmarketably long. Still, I thought, a story should be as long or short as it needs to be. So what if it’s a lot longer than most novels? I actually looked up the word counts of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. The arrogance: me comparing this book to Dune.

Put mildly, when I revisited it in January, Wide Horizon was not Dune. It was a lengthy, wordy, droning tome of a book. The drama I’d prided myself on was consistently blunted by stilted language. It was dripping with moody internal monologuing. The exposition, which I’d already trimmed back years earlier, was still excessive (in my initial edits, at one point I removed an exposition passage over a page in length).

So, armed with what I know about writing now, I traded my scalpel for a hatchet, and went to work. I removed tens of thousands of words of superfluous text. I edited stilted phrasing (where, at the time, I thought I was being clever), modified sentences to remove British speech mannerisms (because, at the time, I was still trying to be Arthur C. Clarke). I cut back on the internal monologuing, either working it into dialogue or omitting it entirely. Through it all, I cursed myself, repeatedly asking (sometimes aloud), “Why did I think this was important?”

As I worked my way through, I found myself looking at a very different story. I’d made excessive use of exposition because I wanted to “set the stage”. But by cutting back on it, I made the story move faster, shifting fluidly from scene to scene. I’d used a lot of awkward wording and British mannerisms because I wanted to show everyone how intelligent I was. But that doesn’t matter; the reader doesn’t care about me, they care about the story. And I’d used excessive internal monologue thinking I was emphasizing the drama of key moments in the story. But by removing most of it, I allowed the characters to convey that themselves. Suddenly, action sequences became more intense. Interpersonal drama felt more tense, more raw. And the story itself became exactly what I’d always intended: a dark, unsettling melodrama interspersed with intense action. After chipping away all the layers of paint, I found a surprisingly powerful story.

Over the course of my editing, I came to realize something I’ve said several times over the past few weeks: as a writer, you end up on the page. The original idea behind Wide Horizon came to me gradually during my college years: a time in anyone’s life that’s dramatic and tumultuous. A time when you’re still trying to figure out who you’re supposed to be. So of course Wide Horizon was originally conceived as a morose, dramatic, pessimistic story. It was born of darkness. But by the time I finally put pen to paper, my twenties were ending. And as such, when I actually sat down to write it, it became something new: hopeful. It no longer felt right to let the bad guys win. I wanted to bring everything to a positive ending, and leave the reader thinking everything would be okay. Because, by that point, I believed that.

I’ve come a long way since Wide Horizon. By the time I began my first draft of Pioneers, five years later, my style had developed. As a result, Pioneers felt different in every way: it was factual, scientific. I’d adopted a technical, aggressive style of writing, moving things swiftly from one scene to the next, and leaving the characters to tell the reader how they felt. One of the first things I thought as I completed the edit of Wide Horizon was that I’d opened up enough real estate to expand the story. And though I decided not to (it’s still pretty long), I began to view that thought as a metaphor for how far I’d come as a writer.

I’d given myself room to grow. – MK