Editing for Length & Pacing :: Lessons from YouTube

I get YouTube videos sent to me all the time.  Most of them are cats or gerbils practicing to ride their Roomba tanks to prepare for world domination, but every once in awhile it's something artsy and/or funny and sometimes they're just plain cool.  This morning, I found a lesson in editing that is very much applicable to writing.

The following video is very violent in a video game sense, and a cool homage to the game Time Crisis and any number of ancillary action movies, Hong Kong flicks and pop culture tidbits tossed in for spice.  The guy that makes these vids is FreddieW and there aren't many indie filmmakers on the net doing it better.

Go ahead and watch it and I'll see you at the end.  (Sorry about the political ad at the beginning, YouTube ads are what they are.)



Why did I just ask you to watch all that?  Because one of the things I heard a lot at PNWA and elsewhere is writers griping about cutting a manuscript. 

A manuscript -- especially from an unproven author -- shouldn't be over 100,000 words unless you're writing fantasy.  The first pass at Palimsest clocked-in at 120,000.  I could get a long way just eliminating a word here and there, but 20k isn't going to go quietly.  I had to cut something I really liked.  And that means examining each scene and asking myself "Why is this scene here?"

Cutting a manuscript is a lot like cutting a movie.  You take what you have and you try to craft the best story you can.  If necessary you go in and write additional material (re-shoots in the film world) but that's an expensive use of time and resources, so it's best to use what you already got.  At the end of this post is a video with the young filmmakers talking about the process of making and cutting this action sequence together.  They spend a lot of time talking about procuring enough cardboard boxes for the shoot and a little about shooting and editing it together, so if you want, you can skip to the 4:00 mark because that's when they start talking about editing.

"Remember -- With editing, the only thing that matters is the the movie as a whole.  It doesn't matter how "cool" it is, or how hard it was to get (or write).  If it doesn't add anything, it doesn't belong."

That's an important lesson for anyone working on a long project like a movie or a novel.  At least with novels you can 'reshoot' without worrying about matching the lighting or whether your actor cut their hair in the interim.



Cultural Cross-Pollination is a series of posts on how writers can draw from other creative venues like stage, film, games, and even cartoons to apply their lessons to writing.  Click the tag below to see previous posts in this series.

Russian Gun Control

Wow.  I must be the only blogger on the internet this week talking about Russians and gun control.

(Pause for uncomfortable laughter)

Spies and guns: the low-hanging fruit of the American blogger, and not at all what I'm going to talk about today.  The second amendment to the US constitution doesn't go where we're going and when you're writing, regardless of your nationality or politics, the one gun you must control belongs to a Russian guy named Chekhov.

"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." 
- Anton Chekhov

Put another way: don't create expectations and then fail to live up to them.

I tend to write very quickly.  In the throes of inspiration, I can throw eight thousand words on a page without stopping to eat as long as the waitress keeps refilling my mug.  In that kind of literary melee it's relatively easy to drop a thread or mention an object and then leave it dangling.  When I'm revising a manuscript (as I am now) the first thing I check for is gun problems.

The most common culprit of this is the tendency to put unnecessary detail into a scene.  It's amazingly easy to get so into your own head that you create a scene populated by minutiae that doesn't serve the plot.  I'm guilty of this myself and revising for me is often about going back and trying to decide which detail and how much will set the scene without drowning the scene.  The danger being that some little bit of detail that you thought was cool at the time will stand out for the reader and take them out of the scene.

There are obvious exceptions to Chekhov's rule.  A policeman (at least an American policeman) or soldier will be carrying a gun and you would have to spend valuable time explaining why he isn't.  Putting a gun in a scene where they're expected isn't violating Chekhov's rule.  Putting one in a drawing room or library and then failing to use it is.  Your audience is left waiting for Godot to walk in and shoot someone and they will resist when you try to pull them into a new scene without first resolving that gun on the table.

Of course, this isn't me telling you that you cannot lay false trails, float red herrings, or make the butler look guilty when it was really the cook.  All of those instances of false foreshadowing are paid-off when you reveal why the butler didn't do it as you must do in the course of revealing that the cook is lying fink.  The payoff is the important part.

Chekhov's "gun" doesn't have to be a firearm.  A character leaving bloody fingerprints on the pages of a book was a neat bit of realism for me because he cut himself in an earlier scene, but my beta readers spent the rest of the book wondering when his bloody fingerprints were going to become important. They weren't important, it was just me shooting my story in the foot with Chekhov's gun.

Any character, artifact or plot element that by its very nature, creates an expectation in the mind of the reader will destroy their suspension of disbelief if it doesn't pan out.

I began this post with a sort red herring about guns and Russians and then pivoted away from the current political hot-button issues to a discussion of dramatic elements.  No one got past the Chekov quote still expecting me to express an opinion about Russian espionage or the Second Amendment.  It might've been a little lame, but it wasn't Chekhov's gun.

Don't annoy your readers or they'll stop reading.  And if they stop reading... you might as well stop writing.  I hope you didn't stop reading. 

As a reward, here's a video I found that brilliantly satirizes the whole concept, and yet manages to effectively illustrate it at the same time (the mark of good satire, in my opinion).

Long Is the way and hard that out of hell leads up to light...

One of the tricks illustrators sometimes use is to draw upside-down because it forces them to view objects differently, a pattern of object and void. I'm posting snippets of the novel I'm editing here for much the same reason. By selecting out tidbits, it forces me to look at them devoid of their surrounding context, focusing my attention on the writing... it's an interesting exercise if you've never tried it. This is what it looks like in the rough draft... ----- The footsteps entered the hall outside as he kicked the closet door shut. They were no longer interested in stealth. They were coming for him. Voices called out commands and responses as he lay wracked by pain just beyond the louvered closet door from them. Booted feet squeaked on the hardwood as they searched for him, room by room drawing ever closer to his hiding place. He used the ties hanging on the wall rack to pull himself upright. His fingernails looked black in the slanted light coming through the door as he scrabbled for the coat-hook hidden behind the hanging suits. The hook spun and clicked and he fell through the secret door into the space beyond. Down the spiral stairs he tumbled, aware that he had made a racket, aware that the men would hear it and come after him. The envelope led the way, held out before him like a talisman as he lurched across the stone floor and up a set of steep concrete steps. The heavy cellar door resisted but he would not be balked, drawn upwards and out by the cold night air. The frigid whip of the rain against his face revived him somewhat and he was able to stumble down the driveway to the street. He leaned against the light pole, trying to catch his breath. His chest felt as though something wild had been caged within and was clawing its way out. Behind him, the shout went up. No more time. He staggered out into the street. His eyes fixed on his destination -- on the innocuous blue box sitting atop the opposite curb. The stylized eagle of the US Postal Service winked at him. His failing sight narrowed to a darkening tunnel at the end of which the mail slot beckoned. He had to reach the handle. Get the envelope in that box before they… “MacLeod!” He spun around, searching with failing eyes for the source of the voice. He stumbled and fell. He could barely feel the bite of the pavement on his palms and knees. Blinding light seared his eyes. His heart shuddered… paused… beat again… Tires screeched. The pain was excruciating, but only for a moment.

A Clear Morning's Cold Dawning... ('Mummer's Masque' snippet)

Chapter One
Seattle, WA

The second week of October brought an unexpected arctic front down from Canada and with it the first frost of the season. Leaves and pine needles scattered before it, bowing and swirling like courtiers in the wake of a courtesan. The residents of Washington State hunkered in front of their fireplaces and woodstoves and waited it out, knowing that the cold couldn’t last. Even with the onset of global climate shifts, their state still had only two seasons: rainy and not; the cold snap was an aberration.

The breeze shredded the column of steam rising from AJ MacLeod’s coffee mug as he stepped out of the Mercedes. The bitter wind cut to the bone, reminding him of winters he had endured during college on the East Coast. He stemmed the memories by focusing on the cup in his hand. The warmth radiating into his palm balanced out the cold seeping into his knuckles from the outside. The sensation centered him, allowed him to shake off the dark memories that clamored at the gates…