Telling Details
H ere’s an odd thing: 16,000 words into a manuscript, I decided I couldn’t do anything with the story without major changes, so I made the changes and only lost about 5,000 words. I put the manuscript aside and went back to the outline. Aside from the theme, the characters and the setting, I started from scratch. The original was about Sara helping a woman convince the father of her child to do the right thing. The revamped version is about Sara’s efforts to keep Ellen from losing a catering contract for the movie that is being filmed in the area. I then went back through the manuscript and deleted everything that didn’t fit. I still had over 10,000 words. I may still have to move some of those words around, because some of the problems to be solved in the new outline were not mentioned in the first 39 pages, but I don’t think I’ll lose many more words. Maybe no one else finds that interesting, but I find the commonality of these two stories very interesting. It seems to indicate that ...