How to Edit Explicit Content out of Your Novel
Last week I shared a little about hitting a wall in my writing and some strategies to overcome partial blocks. One of the things I mentioned was performing a re-write on “A New Past”. I did a little analysis to see what would be involved in stripping out the explicit content and came up with about 15% of the book needing adjustment.
I’m happy to say it was not as drastic as I thought. At 186,000 words, 15% would be roughly 27,000 words to be edited or cleaned out. I’m happy to say the first re-edit is done, with the revised story sitting at approximately 174,000 words, which is about a 6.5% reduction.
How did I do this in such a short time?
I went through the novel, flagging each scene that had explicit content. I must say, some if it was relevant to the character arc I wanted to portray, so I could not just cut quickly. However, some of it was purely to put sexy-time in the book. I found those scenes were easiest to deal with. They were either cut, with a single transitional sentence covering that something romantic happened, or deleted entirely.
The problems were the scenes that are mentioned later in the books, or have some significant impact on the various character arcs. These were a little trickier to deal with.
For example, there is a pretty graphic scene of the first time the two main characters, Paul and Jeryl, make love. Obviously, this is a turning point in their relationship, so cutting it entirely is not possible. Additionally, because there is much of their relationship up to this point building the tension for them to take the final step as a couple, I could not easily gloss over it.
It was these types of scenes that required a lot of focus, editing, and re-writing. I’m not sure I’m done with all that yet, but I am pleased to have the first book done, and sitting for a cooling off period before I re-read and make a final editorial decision on it.
If you’re interested in reading the “PG-13” version of the story, I’ll have some news for you in a month or so. Until then, subscribe here, or follow me on Amazon, GoodReads, or Facebook to get information about upcoming book releases.
