Lost In the World of “The Argus”

One of the most challenging aspects of writing “The Argus” for the As We Convene anthology was staying within the word count. There have been three different iterations of this story. The first evolution resulted in a second draft that redefined Ozkar and Soltesky’s relationship. But the second evolution was taking the story from 9,000 words to about 5,000. 

The best way to do that? Narrow the scope and rewrite it. Scope is not exclusive to short stories or even fiction. For any creative effort, “What is the scope?” is a fair and important question to ask. Need a brochure made up for your company? Okay. What types of things do you want to highlight? What’s your budget? How is this being used? Is it to generate leads? Is it for current clients only? Is this a material that will be pushing the brand in a direction? Or does it need to fall in line with existing brand-compliant materials? All of these questions and more are answered in a creative brief.

Understanding the scope of work lets you know where the boundaries lie and this enables you to identify what is important and what’s not. Can you go beyond that? Of course! That’s the whole point of a first draft, but know that if you spend too much time outside the scope it’s going to take a lot more work to coral it back to true north. 

For “The Argus” the only way to cut 4,000 words was to narrow the scope and the best way to narrow the scope was to alter the story so that the entire thing took place inside the airship and took place over a matter of hours. Doing so forced me to dig into the details of the ship and focus everything on Ozkar’s quest and his emotional arc. But it wasn’t like I just snapped my fingers and 4,000 words vanished. I had to completely rewrite the story.

While this can sound frustrating in many ways it can be liberating. I once had the pleasure of sitting in on a workshop with Lauren Groff where she explained her drafting process. She writes the entire first draft by hand and immediately sets it aside. She then starts rewriting it from scratch, once again by hand. She explained that starting the second draft from scratch forces her to trim a lot of the unnecessary pieces of the story and only keep the essential scenes. It’s an interesting exercise in narrowing a story’s scope. Is this method for everyone? Absolutely not, but having done it on a small scale, I can attest that the mad method works.