A sharp start

 This week I've been looking at finished stories again.  I have a novel and a novella which I want to put in for competitions, so I wanted to have another look at them before I submit them.

The novella has always caused me problems with its start.  The first scene is a meeting between a newly-elected president and her security chief.  The chief needs to tell the president - and the reader - about a historic horrific incident which she needs the President to tackle immediately.

The problem with that sort of scene is that it can easily descend into  a talking-heads info-dump.  I needed to get some action into it.  I also needed to put in some setting without slowing down the narrative.  A third problem I saw when I read it again was that the president wasn't emotionally reacting big enough to the information.  This reflects the kind of person I am.  Unless something really angers or saddens me, most of the time my emotions are pretty calm.

So I needed to sharpen up the start of the novella while putting more emotion into it.  And it took me twelve edits to get the scene down to what I was happy with.  I did re-read the rest of the novella and really loved it, so it was only this info-dumpey start which was letting it down.  When I'd finished editing it I'd cut the scene down from twelve pages to six, and made the president far more emotional.  I'm happy with it now, and it's ready to go out on submission.

The novel didn't have much wrong with it.  I recently won a free sample edit from a highly-respected editor, so the first 5,000 words had been edited by her.  Most of the edits she made were in the nit-picky category.  I hadn't done anything seriously wrong with the manuscript, and yet when I read it through again I could see it would still benefit from some cutting,

One of the things I cut were sentences, and the occasional paragraph, of domestic stuff.  The novel starts with my characters landing on-planet and moving into their new homes, and I found I could cut some tedious logistical details of what they moved to where.

The only thing which needed fixing was the description of the big cats.  They have arms as well as their four legs and I hadn't made that clear.  So I've lengthened the description  of them in both chapters one and two of the novel.

This extra work on both manuscripts gives both of them a sharper start, which I'm confident grabs the reader's attention.  Now I need to go and submit them.