I've been thinking a lot recently about a topic I've often considered over the years, and that I may even have blogged about before now: how there's always room for improvement in writing, however far along your career is and however much you feel you've nailed down a particular piece of work. Now, that's abundantly not to say you should never let anything go; not putting work out into the world because it's insufficiently perfect is one of the archetypal writer mistakes. As a wise man once said, if you never get anything a bit wrong, you'll never get to subsequently feel like such a dumbass that you don't make that same mistake ever again.
No, what I'm talking about is more along the lines of returning to work after months or years and really bringing a fresh perspective. And the reason that's been occupying my thoughts is that I've been spending a lot of my time editing up short fiction. This began as an attempt to finally start subbing some pieces I've written in recent years and had to step away from to focus on novels - the first of those to see the light being Not Us, coming very soon in Nightmare! - but has since expanded to take in others I've been sending out without success for years and that I felt were too good to give up on.
One such is a story called Compassion Fatigue, which I've long regarded as among my best short work and been baffled and faintly annoyed as to why editors seemed to disagree. And, look, I'm not going to turn around and say that everyone who turned it down was in the right, exactly - but returning to it certainly was an insight into how I've developed as a writer in the years since I last looked over it. Yes, the story was good, and probably one of my best, but the execution let it down in ways both big and small. The theme was obscured in places, where it was evident I'd left in first-draft material that ought to have been excised, attempts to wrong-foot the reader on a crucial plot point were wildly misconceived, and there was enormous repetition and overuse of certain words, something I've become extra sensitive to in recent months.
What was most striking, though, was the amount I cut. Pro tip: shorter stories are more saleable, and 3000 to 5000 words is a definite sweet spot. Compassion Fatigue was over 6000, and it didn't take me long to appreciate that there weren't 6000 words of narrative there. I set out to get it down below the golden 5000 mark, but without much hope, because it was one of my better stories, wasn't it? And surely I wouldn't have left over a thousand words flopping about when they could have been trimmed with a more judicious edit? Well, not exactly; there was definitely some killing of darlings to be done to reclaim that lost ground. And yet it absolutely did turn out to be possible, and more to the point, beneficial. Some nice lines got sacrificed to the cause, if I do say so, but every one was slowing the pace or repeating points that had already been made or providing detail and texture that wasn't really necessary. In the end, I broke my target with room to spare, and there was precisely one line I felt genuinely sad to see go, and that got cut simply because other cuts had stranded it between two paragraphs. These things happen sometimes.
As a commercial exercise, I suspect this is a terrible waste of energy: I'd need a pro sale and then some to pay for all the hours I've poured in, and given that all the pro markets have turned it down, the odds aren't favourable. But then, with all my major projects handed in and nothing on the horizon - yes, that's as bad news as it sounds, but a topic for another day - I have a certain amount of time to waste, and also an opportunity to decide what matters to me if I can't turn things around in the coming weeks. Short fiction was always my first love, and I feel less inclined than ever to give up on stories I know in my heart deserve to see some success. So fingers crossed, right? Maybe I'll find a good home for Compassion Fatigue one of these days, and if and when that happens, it'll be a damn sight better than it would have been if I hadn't put this extra work in.
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