Hey Maggie, love the first 8 chapters of CDTH! This is gonna be a very detail-oriented question, but when reading I noticed quite a few differences between the final version and the sampler. In particular, SPOILER, Ronan "thumbs the well-used furrow betwee

Dear comicsohwhyohwhy,

I’m glad you loved it!

One day when the book is out and it’s not a spoiler for people trying to avoid all stuff before the whole thing is out, I might actually do a line by line comparison of a chapter from it beside its various iterations, because it’s a pretty good look at my thought process while line editing.

Every draft of my novels up until the very last is on-the-nose shorthand for me. I simply can’t write without doing increasing layers of complexity and nuance — it’s too hard to get things out of my head all at the same time. That means that my very first draft has cringy, on the nose dialog. Bald, over the top fight scenes. Perfunctory description. Overlong explanations the logistics for where the characters are going. Three different metaphors when one will do. Emotional and plot reveals are written willy nilly, without thought yet to where the best place to put them is. Pacing is ridiculous, as you can imagine, as paragraph length and density and number controls how fast a reader goes through a chapter, so sometimes they speed through a scene that needs weight or dawdle on a scene that needs speed.

So then I begin to edit.

Every pass through the manuscript takes away some of that clunk, on the nose storytelling, and makes it into something that’ll hopefully do more work in the reader’s subconscious by the end of the book. Every pass through tries to clarify instead confuse, so that the reader understands the rules of magic and the stakes of the book without having to think about it. Every pass through tries to change internal monologue and external dialog to in-character versions of that on-the-nose narration. Every pass through tries to make sure that everything is stacked in the correct order: emotional and plot beats have to build, which means not starting with too much, too soon, and not sagging in the middle. Reveals are adjusted, word choice is streamlined, repeated sentences and unnecessary stage directions cut. Everything in later passes is done with an understanding of where the novel and prose and character ends up later. Finally, scaffolding is removed and then we stand back and smile at the house we’ve built.

I had to go looking to see which bit you meant. It was cut for pacing and tone, and because at the late stage of line edits, I had a full understanding of how much screen time their relationship got in this first book overall and how that scene fit into it.

urs,

Stiefvater

ETA: From my inbox, I know that there’s much debate the deletion of this single gesture and why I would do such a thing and what does it MEAN, but please remember that what you guys have to analyze until November is a slim 8 chapter sampler — a slender fragment of the actual book, which is 480 pages. For me, it was a throwaway jotted shorthand, a tiny tiny piece of a much bigger whole. I know waiting is hard, but I promise there will be far more interesting Ronan and Adam moments than that to come; you will not have to mourn pacing cuts.