The version of the book that two or three generations grew up on. As you can see, my copy is a little worse for wear (and I think maybe this was my SECOND copy). But it still reads better than the ‘new’ edition.
That’s a variation on the usual truism, “Everybody needs an editor.”
I changed the wording to emphasize that, even if you don’t have someone else to edit you (which you should, if at all possible), whatever you’ve written deserves a hard second (or third or fourth or fifth) look from you, the writer.
That’s not nearly as good, for catching errors, as a fresh set of eyes. The problem with editing yourself is that you know what you meant to write, and there’s an overwhelming tendency on the writer’s part to see the intention instead of what’s actually there. Whereas another person is far more likely to say, after the briefest glance, “What the hell do mean here?”
But if you’ve looked away for awhile, you can come back with at least a relatively fresher eye than immediately after writing the copy in question.
More than that, if the type of editing needed is to make the copy shorter, you’re the best person to do the job. You’re less likely to chuck out the nuances of what you were trying to say in the process of cutting.
Of course, people don’t often trim their copy unless an irresistible outside force is making them do it. And since online writing is almost completely without space limits, such outside forces have almost completely disappeared. It takes strong personal discipline, which I utterly fail to bring into play except on rare occasions. I don’t really have time to check for errors on this blog — which is why so many occur — much less slash and trim to make the copy more svelte. Hey, I didn’t have time to write the post in the first place, which is why I do it so seldom these days.
Cutting your own copy is a very time-consuming process, which is why Mark Twain wrote “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” When I was writing for the paper, my Sunday columns usually took me about two hours to write. Then, because writing in a free-association manner made the columns twice as long as we had room for, I turned to the second half of the process. Cutting them down (usually to half the unedited length) took another two hours. But this pretty much always made them better. (Why not make it the right length to start with? That didn’t work — for me. I had to get the whole idea down in front of me, and that meant letting the words flow until I’d set it all out. Otherwise, I’d lose it. I couldn’t stop to worry about leaving things out. I needed to get it all in front of me before whittling down to essentials.)
That’s the thing. Cutting almost always makes the copy better. Carefully considering every single word in terms of whether it adds to or detracts from what you’re trying to say makes a difference.
Recently, I’ve learned that the same applies to novels. Last year, I found myself with a little time to kill in a Barnes & Noble. So I grabbed a book off a shelf and plopped down in an upholstered chair to start reading. Since I wouldn’t have time to finish it, I grabbed something I’d read before, many times since 1970: Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. At least, I thought that’s what it was.
Right away, something surprised me: The very first lines were quite different. It started like this:
Those first two lines threw me, on two levels. First, it was unfamiliar, and second, it didn’t quite work. I was used to it beginning like this:
I’d always admired that lede. The first line was great, as a summary of what the book would be about, flavored with the irony of an alien from space having such a name.
After that, no time was wasted. The next words launch immediately into the narrative, with no mucking about. In other words, no pointless, silly lines such as “Valentine Michael Smith was as real as taxes but he was a race of one.” Something that adds nothing, and is obviously something that at some point, the author thought sounded clever. Never mind the silly cliche of “when the world was young.”
The preface of this new edition explained why I was reading something so odd and overwritten. It seems this was the original text of the novel, as Heinlein had sent it to his publishers in 1960. The publishers thought the book was so far off the beaten path (which it was) that they wanted him to cut it down to minimize their risk. So he did. He cut it down from 220,000 words to 160,000.
As near as I can tell — I later ran quickly through this new-old version from beginning to end (at my request, someone gave it to me as a gift last year) — he didn’t cut out big chunks, such as entire chapters. He cut it the same way I would cut a column — a few words from practically every paragraph, eliminating phrases or sentences that were truly unnecessary to telling the story, and that added nothing that was worth keeping.
But Robert Heinlein’s widow, Virginia, found this version after his death, and she explains in the preface, “I came to the conclusion that it had been a mistake to cut the book.” She then showed it to the late author’s agent, who agreed with her. The agent showed it to the publishing house, and they agreed, too.
But they were all wrong, probably for their own reasons. The widow probably thought every word her dear husband had written was golden, so how dare anyone make him cut 60,000 of them out? And while I don’t mean to cast aspersions, I expect the agent and publishers saw dollar signs as they imagined putting out a “new” Stranger in a Strange Land.
(By the way, I keep saying “new.” Actually, this “uncut” version — that’s what the publishers call it; my description would be “unedited and therefore incomplete” — first came out in 1991. I just didn’t run across it until last year. Even when I had downloaded a Kindle edition earlier in this decade, it had been the version I was used to. It’s confusing.)
I was unimpressed with the opening you see above, and had the same reaction throughout the text, over and over. I’ll share a couple of other examples, chosen rather randomly. The first is from the section when Gillian Boardman and Smith have recently taken refuge with Jubal Harshaw. I’ll start with the cut version that I had read and enjoyed for decades:
And here’s the longer version that Heinlein’s widow thought was better:
Sorry, folks, but I don’t see it. That business about linguistics and Jill’s youth is unnecessary. That, and especially the knotty phrase “I misdoubt I am not” really needed to go. I would had tossed them in a second reading even if I hadn’t been under pressure to do so.
Then there’s this, after the “battle of the swimming pool” at Jubal’s place. First, the cut version:
Works for me. And now the uncut:
Did that add any value for you? All that extra verbiage was just a boring delay to me. We don’t need the “what makes the frog jump” line. We know Jubal likes colorful metaphors. A certain number of them help to define his crusty character. But the ones Heinlein kept were better than this one. Just get on with your point, doctor.
NOTHING that I read for the first time in this long version made me think “this makes it better.” That fact made me more impressed than ever with the shorter version. It showed that Robert Heinlein had great judgment, and knew just what to cut to make the book better, not just shorter.
Why do I tell you all this? Because I think it’s a good way of illustrating something I learned, often painfully, over the course of my newspaper career. However much you may love your prose, if you’re forced to cut it, and you do so carefully and thoughtfully, it will almost always turn out better.
Nothing in the history of writing needed 60,000 surplus words to delay and bore the reader. That won’t make the frog jump at all…
The ‘new’ edition of the book, with 60,000 utterly unnecessary words.
