Coming soon! Atlanta Stories: Fables of the New South. Eight stories about people coming to Atlanta to reinvent themselves. Stories include:
Release date: August 1.
Available at online bookstores and direct from the author.
Some years ago, the Reader’s Digest caused quite a stir by issuing a condensed version of the Bible. Televangelists were up in arms, some going so far as to burn the book and calling for an all out boycott of the Reader’s Digest organization. Despite all the outrage, no one seems to care that there are numerous versions of the Protestant Bible, different translations, different interpretations, different concordances, each of which alters the meaning of the text, sometimes significantly. Many still view the authorized King James Bible as the official version, totally ignoring that it was based on Greek and Latin texts which may not have agreed with one another.
Marcion, an early Christian leader with Gnostic leanings, in the second century, made one of the first attempts at organizing a canonical version of the Bible. His list included mostly Gospels and Epistles and none of the Hebrew scriptures. While his version was never considered authoritative by the emerging Western Church, it served as the scripture for his congregations for several centuries, and Marcion is credited among those who began the discussions that led to the Christian canon being formalized. Thomas Jefferson compiled his own condensed version of the Bible that included the sayings of Jesus and rejected books such as Revelation, which he described as “the ravings of a maniac”.
Scholars agree that the earliest versions of most of the Gospels were written in Greek, a language neither Jesus nor his closest followers spoke or wrote. This would not have been unusual for the time, since only the most educated and specially-trained in society would have been able to write in Latin or Greek and most people spoke in the dialects common to the region in which they lived. Scholars have also noted many changes, transcription errors, and additions common among different texts of the same Gospel. Mark, for instance, in its familiar format, has sixteen lines added to the end of it that don’t appear in the earliest known versions, and once had a secret version that included extra lines, which was written about by early church fathers who considered it problematic but nonetheless regarded it as authoritative. The Gnostics claimed Mark had three versions, the commonly known version, the secret version, and an oral version Mark would only share directly with believers.
For many Christians in the United States, the English translation of the Protestant Bible is considered to be the inerrant word of God. This is despite the fact that the English language as we know it was not spoken by anyone when the material that made it into the Bible was being written and compiled. There is significant evidence to show that the works in the Bible are not rendered in their original form. One such example can be found in Richard Elliot Friedman’s work, The Hidden Book in the Bible, which recreates what Friedman has called the world’s first novel, that was chopped up and dispersed throughout the early books of the Old Testament. The Bible itself speaks of its incomplete nature, citing in Kings and Chronicles the very works on which these summaries are based and referring readers to them, and in other places, mentioning sources that are now lost to modern readers.
With any translation there are two problems to confront: comprehension, or, does the translator understand the material he or she is reading, and interpretation, is the translator accurately conveying what the material is saying. Translating from Spanish to Italian, for instance, may not yield many overt problems, because the languages are similar and come from the same root, Latin. Translating from Spanish into German will most likely pose more problems, since the languages have very little in common. Even so, the material being translated can have a huge impact on how successful the translation will be. A shipping list of common household items will likely be easier to translate than an epic poem, since objects are much easier to describe than ideas.
The task is compounded by cultural differences. People who live in a land-locked mountainous region are likely to have ideas and concepts that would be foreign to coastal, seafaring people, even if they speak the same language. If one is trying to convey a concept to someone unfamiliar with it, it’s helpful to have concepts with which to compare it, and it’s not always possible to find a reliable comparison. Perhaps the mountain dwellers have a word to describe the sound the wind makes as it rustles through the trees. Relaying that word to the seafarers will tell them what it means, but simply knowing the meaning would not convey the memories or sensations the mountain dwellers invoke when using it. Another example would be equating the Jewish concept of a Messiah, that is a ruler from the Davidic line of kings with the Pagan concept of the Christ, a dying and resurrected savior-king such as Attis.
The people who wrote and compiled the Bible lived in a much different world, under vastly different circumstances than we do. Ideas and concepts we take for granted would be as foreign to our ancestors as theirs would seem to us. We have their static words, but not how they used their language for day to day affairs, or to communicate important beliefs or rituals. Words can sometimes lose certain nuances when written rather that spoken, as anyone who has ever misread a text or Internet post can attest. Since many of the stories which comprise the Bible started out as oral folklore, how the storyteller told the story was often as important as the words being said. Describing a leader as “great” has a different meaning if the person saying it has a sarcastic edge to his or her voice and unless this delivery is recorded with the words, the meaning will be lost. Since we were not present to hear how these stories were told, we cannot be certain how they were intended. Finally, people in a culture can develop shorthand in communicating where they leave out concepts that are generally accepted in their society, assumptions a native would know without being told. Our society takes cars for granted. If we’re communicating with an isolated tribe in the Amazon which has mostly been shielded from modern technology, telling them we “drove” someplace won’t have much meaning for them.
One cannot claim the Bible is the inerrant word of God when there are multiple official versions of the Bible that are accepted as authoritative and which do not always agree with one another. If the Protestant Bible is the inerrant word of God, then how does one assess the Catholic Bible, which is older, contains more material, and which includes the Septuagint, which was the authoritative Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures for several centuries, up to and including the time of Jesus. While one can isolate portions of the Bible which may have sprung from what seemed to be divine inspiration, such as the Psalms, or Ecclesiastes, there are many more portions that exhibit obvious editorial oversight, such as the book of Judges, which constantly reminds its readers that the stories took place before Israel had a king. Mark is believed by most scholars to have been the first Gospel and was the basis for Matthew and Luke. In his Gospel, Matthew corrects instances where Mark erred, such as in relating the pronunciation of Jesus’ final words on the cross, or when Mark, not familiar with the geography of Judea, got place names wrong. Apparently the author of Matthew did not regard the author of Mark as infallible.
Isaac is almost a footnote in the history of Israel. He’s born; he’s almost sacrificed by his father; he marries Rebekah; he buries Abraham; he fathers Esau and Jacob; he almost gives Rebekah to Abimelek; he’s tricked into giving away Esau’s blessing to Jacob; then he reconciles with Jacob and dies, all in the span of a few chapters. Abraham’s story takes up most of Genesis 12-25, from the call of Abraham to his death. Isaac’s story overlaps Abraham’s in chapters 21-25 and by chapter 27, the story of Jacob is starting to overlap that of Isaac. By chapter 28, the focus of Genesis has shifted to Jacob, now on his way to his uncle Laban’s household, where many of his adventures will occur, and we only have a few mentions of Isaac from here on. The only story about Isaac that’s not tied to either Abraham or Jacob is Genesis 26, which is a verbatim retelling of the story of Abraham and Abimelek, from Genesis 20, but unlike his father, Isaac doesn’t get cattle or grazing rights out of the encounter. The incident with Abimelek adds nothing tangible to the story of Isaac, and seems to have been inserted simply to give Isaac an adventure of his own before skipping to the story of his son Jacob.
Even in stories where he’s featured, Isaac takes a secondary role. When YHWH tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac (something that was never done with Ishmael, the oldest) it’s to test Abraham’s faith. Abraham accepts the request without question, which seems rather odd. Recall that in Genesis 18, when YHWH tells Abraham that Sodom and Gomorrah are to be destroyed, Abraham barters with YHWH to gain concessions for the denizens of those towns, yet here, YHWH is telling him to sacrifice the son he’s waited until his old age to have and Abraham seems totally okay with it. We’re not told how old Isaac is, but at one point, he speaks to Abraham, so he must be at least five or six years old, and maybe as old as eight or nine. Despite this, he doesn’t say anything when it becomes apparent Abraham is about to sacrifice him.
In the ancient world, whenever a town was founded, often the founder would sacrifice his oldest child, usually a son, to become the guardian spirit of the town. There’s a mention of this practice in 1 Kings 16:34, describing the rebuilding of Jericho. In this instance, however, Abraham is not founding a city, as he’s still depicted as a nomadic herder. There are clues to suggest that in the original legend, Abraham sacrificed Isaac, and this fact was altered by the author of Genesis, who was writing after human sacrifice had been abolished. The death of Sarah immediately follows the story of Abraham being tested, and the death of a son she had at an advanced age, combined with all the other factors working against her, might have been sufficiently stressful to hasten her end. If this is so, it placed quite a burden on the author of Genesis to account for an individual who wasn’t originally in the story line.
The solution seems to have been to make Isaac the conduit through which Abraham was connected to Jacob. Either that or there was a tradition among the tribes that Isaac was the father of Jacob but that they were somehow descended from Abraham, so the author of Genesis made the logical leap. In genealogy, it’s often a common error to attribute a child to a nearby family with a similar name. It’s also possible that then, as today, many different people claimed descent from Abraham with no rhyme or reason as to how and Isaac was used by the children of Israel to make their connection. Unlike Abraham, who started out as Abram, and Israel, who started out as Jacob, Isaac is not given a new name, signifying a covenant with YHWH. His “covenant” was through that of his father, and fulfilled by the descendants of his son.
In all probability, these stories are based on authentic legends about Isaac and Jacob, since they don’t show Jacob in the best light, being deceptive in taking his brother’s birthright and later in deceiving his uncle Laban (who pretty much deserved it) into giving away the best of the flock when they divided their assets. Most of the story of Abraham and his descendants through Jacob are part of the “hidden book” discovered by Richard Elliott Friedman in the pages of the Old Testament and chronicled in his work, The Hidden Book in the Bible.
Trying to discern the origins of the universe from within the universe is like trying to figure out how a cake was made using only the evidence of the finished cake. It’s there; we see it, but deciphering all that went into it is difficult, because the finished product is more than just the sum of its parts. We can speculate, based on our senses, what some of the ingredients were; we can develop theories as to how the various elements came together, but we can’t know for sure how it came into being unless we’re there to observe the process of creating it. Of course, in the case of a cake, we can be there to observe how one is made. Not so with the universe.
Religion tells us God created the heavens and the Earth; science shows us the nuts and bolts of what went into building the universe. Religion says it began with light; science says it all began with a bang. With sound moving much slower than light, it’s possible to still hear echoes of the big bang provided one has the right equipment. What set it off, though? What was the catalyst that put everything in motion? To date, no one on either side of the debate has a definitive answer that satisfies everyone. All anyone knows is that it’s here; we inhabit it; all living things are a part of it.
Most of what we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell is an illusion, created for us by how our brains interpret the signals the environment throws at us. How one person perceives the world may be vastly different than another person. We use language to help bridge the gap, but even language is a tool we’ve invented to serve a specific purpose, and often falls short in conveying an accurate description of the sensations of living. Time is another tool designed to give us reference points in our perception. In truth, we live in neither the past nor the future but in the eternal present experiencing what goes on in the world as it happens. Our brains allow us to store memories and recall them, perhaps with a bit of alteration, and to imagine outcomes not yet realized, giving us a semblance of a past and future.
We created the notion of God because humanity believes it needs a parental figure watching over us, someone to tell us who we are and why we’re here. Everything has a beginning and an end, and individual humans have parents, therefore humanity has to have such “parents” from whom we sprang. This model is already faulty, though, because individual humans have two parents, regardless of whether both are known, whereas most modern religions only mention one parental deity. In much of nature, it’s the female who bears the responsibility for giving birth, but in many modern religions, the female deity has been erased from the equation.
As humans, we have an inherent need to understand our origins. Where we came from and why is at least as important to us as what we’re here to accomplish. There are no easy answers to the question. It remains for each individual to determine the answer for himself or herself. We may, one day, come to definitive conclusions about our common origins, but in the meantime, we should do all we can to enjoy the pursuit.
Throughout the book of Genesis, YHWH has been telling Abraham that his descendants will one day possess the land of Canaan, which usually meets with skepticism from Abraham. His sometimes sister, sometimes wife, Sarah, is barren and said to be well beyond the age when women could produce children. YHWH has gone so far as to change Abraham and Sarah’s names, and introduce the ritual of circumcision to Abraham to prove he means business. In Genesis 21, YHWH walks the walk instead of just talking the talk, and Sarah conceives and gives birth to a son, who they name Isaac. Abraham is said to be one hundred years old at the time, so we must assume Sarah is close to that age, since she’s been with him all along.
Of course, nowadays, we know one hundred year old women are no longer capable of giving birth, and most would have no intentions to do so if they could. Assuming she was a legend and not a myth, Sarah was probably in her early to mid-50s, a considerably advanced age for a woman of that time, and would have been perceived as too old to give birth, though it is still a possibility at that age. Genesis later records that Sarah dies before Abraham, and given how difficult childbirth is for a woman of any age, the rigors of a nomadic lifestyle, in addition to her advanced age would have made the process much more hazardous. Why it was deemed necessary to wait so long is one of the enduring mysteries of Genesis. In all probably, the story that’s recorded was influenced by the legend of Abraham fathering a child at an advanced age, which suggests Ishmael and Isaac may not have been his only offspring, since prominent men were allowed to have as many wives and concubines as they could support, and Abraham is constantly said to be one of the most prominent. It’s unlikely he was really one hundred, since the life expectancy wasn’t more than forty to fifty, and his many swashbuckling adventures, such as saving Lot, would have meant that he’d have needed to be exceptionally spry for his age, but he could have been in his sixties or seventies, which might have seemed like a hundred to people not accustomed to living past forty.
Speaking of Ishmael, the birth of Isaac creates problems for him and his mother Hagar. Genesis tells us Sarah catches Ishmael “mocking” during the celebration of Isaac’s circumcision. She orders Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away, and Abraham isn’t happy about it, until he receives word from YHWH that Ishmael will also be the progenitor of a significant tribe, just for being Abraham’s son. Abraham gives them some provisions and water and they wander out into the desert. When the water runs out, Hagar puts Ishmael under a bush and moves some distance away from him, so she doesn’t have to watch him die. YHWH hears Ishmael crying and sends an angel to tell Hagar everything will be okay, then leads her to a well. Later, Hagar finds him a bride from among the Egyptians. From here on, we’re done with Ishmael until Abraham dies.
Abraham’s old pal Abimelek makes another appearance. Readers will recall that when these two met in the previous chapter, Abimelek tried to take Sarah as his wife, believing her to be Abraham’s sister and much younger than she actually is, which prompted a vision from YHWH to tell him it wasn’t such a good idea. Now Abraham approaches Abimelek about a well which is being disputed by some of his people. Abimelek seems stunned to hear about the situation with the well in question and he and Abraham agree to enter into a treaty over it, known as the Treaty of Beersheba. Finished bestowing Abraham with another sweet deal over water rights, Abimelek heads out with his army commander back to his kingdom. Abraham plants a tamarisk tree, and calls on the Eternal God, something we’ve not heard YHWH called in Genesis before, which concludes the episode.
There’s not a lot of obvious embellishment with the story, though some details raise some questions. As previously stated, it’s not clear why it was necessary to constantly remind Abraham that descendants of his, several hundred years in the future, will inherit Canaan. Obviously, readers with several thousand years of hindsight will understand the significance of these promises, but it’s not clear what a nomadic herdsman is supposed to do with the information. Abraham seems to have spent most of his time guiding his sizable flocks and herds throughout the region from Babylon to Egypt, telling people his wife is his sister and using the fallout from it to craft deals for more livestock, water, and grazing lands. He must have been a towering figure in the folklore to occupy such an important place in the history of the Children of Israel, though the stories in Genesis don’t always demonstrate why that is. He has certainly seemed very resourceful and shrewd, and his relationship to YHWH is unparalleled among most in the Bible, with the possible exception of Joseph or David.
The Bible is as much a political document as it is a religious one. Stories printed there were crafted to support a specific narrative, perhaps to bolster the reign of a particular king or party in its quest for control. Over time, these stories were edited, re-edited, and re-arranged to support different narratives. One such example can be found in Richard Elliott Friedman’s work, The Hidden Book in the Bible, where he uses textual analysis of the earliest Greek sources to piece together a complete book covering the story of creation through the conquest of Canaan that had been spread throughout the early books of the Old Testament. The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, attempts to reconcile the story of Israel told in its archaeological record with what’s written in the pages of the Bible, and finds a much different narrative written in the ruins. Kings who were vilified in the Bible emerge as some of the longest ruling and most successful in the archaeological record. Even within the pages of the Bible, different books provide different views of the tribes who came to be known as the children of Israel, in particular Genesis and Judges.
In order to understand the purpose of a literary work, it’s necessary to look at the stories presented and the way in which the narrative is crafted. In Genesis, following the flood, the main hero is Abraham, whose story takes up chapters eleven through twenty-five. Excluding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which exclusively involves Lot, that’s fourteen of the fifty chapters of Genesis. This isn’t surprising, considering what a towering figure Abraham is in Middle Eastern lore. His son, Isaac only gets a few chapters, one of which is a retelling of a story originally attributed to his father, before Jacob’s story takes over, and the stories of Jacob and his family take up the rest of Genesis, which ends with the death of Joseph in Egypt.
In it, we learn how Jacob deceived his brother Esau (also known as Edom father of the Edomites), claimed Esau’s birthright, and fled to his uncle’s family to avoid retribution. Jacob fell in love with Rachel, but was deceived by his uncle into marrying her sister Leah, then had to perform additional servitude to gain Rachel’s hand, and Genesis tells us Rachel was his favored wife. Jacob also had two concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, who produced four of the sons who would be the progenitors of the tribes who later identified themselves as the children of Israel. Leah is the mother of most of Jacob’s offspring, including Levi and Judah, two prominent tribes in later Jerusalem and she’s listed as being buried with Jacob in Genesis 49. We learn that Rachel bore two sons, Joseph and Benjamin. Though Leah is the most productive of Jacob’s wives, being the mother of six sons and one daughter, Dinah, all the attention is focused on Rachel, naming her as Jacob’s most beloved wife. This focus on Rachel extends all the way to the Gospel of Matthew, who, in relating the slaughter of the innocents, misquotes as prophesy, verses from Jeremiah lamenting the exile of Ephraim (Rachel crying out for her lost children). This is despite the fact that the majority tribe in Jerusalem was that of Judah, who was Leah’s son.
Where Judges exhibits very crude editorial oversight, adding lines here and there to connect what were obviously individual tales from different sources, Genesis seems to have been crafted with the specific intention of relating the origin story of the sons of Israel. Rather than simply collecting the myths and legends, the author of Genesis used them as the basis for a new telling of the story, and Genesis is far more polished than Judges, which is loosely cobbled together with only a cursory attempt to unify the stories — the editorial asides that the stories happened before Israel had a king. In Genesis, the narrative has been crafted to unify the story of the sons of Israel, and to highlight one son in particular, Joseph. Most likely, the different stories came from sources similar to what’s found in Judges, that the editors of Genesis had to reconcile. Each tribe that claimed descent from Abraham undoubtedly had its own traditions about him, just as Arabs and Jews do today. Since most of the population couldn’t read, the editors could afford to add in multiple traditions and let scholars debate them later.
In all probability, Genesis was assembled by someone who came from the tribe of Ephraim — the tribe who claimed descent from Joseph — or felt a kinship with it, given how prominent Joseph is depicted within the narrative. Ironically, Ephraim is one of the tribes said to have been carted off by the Assyrians, never to be heard from again though remnants could have escaped to Judah after the exile. A later editor who knew of the fate of Ephraim, may have altered the story somewhat to give Judah more prominence, but the narrative flow still makes Joseph the ultimate hero of the story. The only story we get on Judah outside the context of Joseph’s story is of his relationship with his daughter-in-law Tamar, with whom he fathered Perez, the ancestor of David. Joseph was the full brother of Benjamin, whose tribe avoided the fate of Ephraim and survived to become one of the more prominent tribes that inhabited Jerusalem up to the time of Jesus. Joseph is also the reason his brothers go to Egypt, from which their descendants must flee in Exodus.
Joseph’s story starts in Genesis 37, and takes up the bulk of the remaining chapters of Genesis ending with the blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh in Genesis 48 and Joseph’s death in chapter 50. We learn of his gift for prophecy, his brothers’ jealousy of him, and their initial decision to kill him, which is softened into the action of selling him into bondage. Reuben is the brother who prevents the others from killing Joseph, and Judah is the one who convinces them to sell Joseph into bondage, which sets in motion the fulfillment of Joseph’s prophecies. The very next chapter in Genesis relates the story of Judah and Tamar which the author of Ruth uses as the basis for the genealogy of David. With the story of Jacob’s death in Genesis 49, Joseph takes the lead on burial and tributes to his father, with his brothers hardly being mentioned at all.
The tribes most often mentioned in Judges are Judah, Ephraim, Benjamin, the Levites, and Dan. The opening chapter of Judges gives an update on the various conquests of the tribes which may have been inserted by a later editor to tie the book to the previous story of Joshua. In this introduction, it’s stated that the Benjamites were not able to drive the Jebusites from Jerusalem and lived along side them and that other tribes were unable to dislodge the Canaanites from their land, setting up the temptations that will lead the Israelites astray throughout Judges. At the end of Judges, a Levite from the hill country of Ephraim has problems while spending the night among the tribe of Benjamin, leading to the near destruction of the tribe in the resulting retaliation. In Genesis, we’re told that Joseph, the father of Ephraim, was the loving older brother of Benjamin.
In Judges, Benjamin, Ephraim, and Judah among others, are tribes; in Genesis, they’re individuals, and in Genesis 49 Jacob/Israel blesses each of his sons and the words he uses sum up how each tribe was viewed by the author or editor of Genesis. One brother who does not fare well in the narrative is Levi, which is interesting given that the Levites, or priestly class which includes Moses and Aaron in Exodus, is said to descend from Levi. In Genesis, Simeon and Levi are criticized for using their swords in anger — the incident is described in detail in Genesis 34 pertaining to Dinah and the Shechemites — and condemned to be scattered and dispersed in Israel. The two sons who get most of the praise, not surprisingly, are Judah and Joseph, each with long blessings which places them above all the rest. Benjamin is compared to a ravenous wolf, and in Judges, displays considerable military prowess when fighting the other tribes. Reuben, the oldest son, is all but disowned by his father for offenses he committed and the remaining sons each gets a descriptive line or two.
Isaac Asimov, in his Guide to the Bible, identifies stories in Judges as perhaps the oldest material to appear in the Bible. The story of Deborah, is notable, in that it presents us with one of the few women in the Bible who is not solely defined by the men in her life, as are most of the women in Genesis. The stories in Judges bear almost no kinship to those in Genesis, except for the tribal identity of the sons. Judges follows the pattern of Israel “doing evil in the eyes of the Lord” which leads to them being conquered by one of the local, larger tribes, prompting the need for a leader or “judge” to arise and save them.
Bear in mind, the people who crafted the stories that eventually found themselves in the Bible were in constant competition with other tribes for the resources of the land they inhabited. Three of the most prominent mentioned in the Bible were the Moabites, the Ammonites, and the Philistines. In Genesis, the attitude of the author to the Moabites and Ammonites was made plain by reporting that they were the product of the illegitimate and incestuous union of Lot and his two daughters following the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Judges reports on these tribes as well and chronicles many of the difficulties faced by the Israelites at the hands of the Philistines. In particular, Samson has a considerable beef with the Philistines for reasons unknown, other than they’re oppressing the Israelites. Samson’s actions, however, are usually in service to his own selfish motives, rather than in service to any of the tribes.
As one develops as a writer, one becomes aware of the painful reality that not everything one writes, no matter how well-crafted or heartfelt, will see the light of day. In many cases, favorite phrases or passages must be sacrificed for the overall good of the piece. Improving the quality of the writing doesn’t make excising them any easier though. In some ways, the process is akin to killing a well-loved child.
A writer has just crafted the perfect paragraph, one that beautifully sums up the character and situation, all the while being witty, insightful, and concise and try as one might, it can’t be worked into the context of the story in progress. I once crafted this opening paragraph:
Aaron Slaughter was appropriately named. He was born bad and grew up mean and never did a kind turn for anyone, from the moment the doctor slapped him on the butt to the day they strapped him in the electric chair and put forty thousand volts through him. I was there that day, and while I’m not normally the sort of person to enjoy watching another human being die, I made an exception in Aaron’s case. See, I’m the man who put him there.
As happy as I am with the paragraph, I have never found a use for it in anything I’ve written.
What’s worse than being unable to use good material is having to remove it after fitting it into a work. Editing is actually where the real work of writing begins. Few writers are able to set words onto paper exactly the way they will eventually be finalized. I tend to be an organic writer and once I get into a work, the words flow with no rhyme or reason. Editing is crucial to my process, because when I’m writing, my only concern is getting the thoughts into words. As the work grows, a pattern begins to emerge and I can start rearranging paragraphs, adding and deleting lines until the piece says what I want in the way I want it said. Along the way, lots of favorite lines and phrases get cast aside.
Removing material does not mean the material is bad, just as rejection of a manuscript or play doesn’t mean the writing is lousy. It simply means the material does not work with the piece as a whole. I wrote an entire section for my novel The Long-Timers in which the main character was brought before the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, which did not make it into the finished work. When I reworked the novel into A Tale of Two Sisters, however, I found a place for the material again. Oftentimes, material that doesn’t fit in one work, may be just what’s lacking in another.
As writers, we learn to maintain journals or files of ideas and phrases which may someday make it into a story or play. Carrying around miniature computers in our pockets makes this task easier. I like to retain text files of everything I remove from a story or play, since I may find a use for it somewhere else, and since Acrobat allows for editing marks, I’m now able to preserve drafts of works in progress. In some cases, I’ve taken bits and pieces of excised material to fill out or enhance a different work, or borrowed scenes from one play to use in another.
Still, cutting scenes or paragraphs from a work isn’t easy. “They’re my babies,” a writer might say. “I can’t kill them!” If one is to evolve as a writer, however, it’s a skill one must master. At one time, a publisher would pair an author with an editor who would take on the harsh process of excising passages, but with independent authors publishing their own work, a professional editor is often a luxury one simply cannot afford. It becomes the writer’s responsibility to make the necessary cuts.
Obviously, no one will be seriously harmed if a novel, story, or play is a few hundred words shorter than the author initially conceived it. The goal is always to convey the most ideas with the fewest words. As authors, we must continually strive to improve the craft and say what we mean as succinctly as possible, even if it means killing a few of our babies.
