Death by delete button

[John Dean]

I have always said that I write fast and edit slow, by which I mean that I hurl words onto the page then spend most of the time working and reworking them, rather like a sculptor finishing a work. A little chip here, another one there.

I feel that this editing process is crucial and an example cropped up when I was writing The Secrets Man.

There was a scene, an important scene, in which there was a death in a place containing thirty people. It was a deliberately confused scene and my detectives interviewed several witnesses to try to ascertain what had happened. Interviewed too many people, in fact.

Two characters pointlessly repeated each other and one was created entirely for the scene and did not appear anywhere else in the novel.

So, she had her lines given to the ‘survivor’ and she disappeared from the book. Even though I quite liked her in the short time we had known each other, she had to go. Murdered by the delete button.

The result? A scene with added pace and zip and much cleaner narrative flow. A fine sacrifice by my character indeed.

Why does this come to mind? Well, I recently gave a talk and when I gave it, I gave a little nod to the character I killed off to explain the importance of editing.

You can find out more about the book at  https://www.amazon.co.uk/SECRETS-MAN-gripping-murder-mystery-ebook/...