On attempting an abridgement of Daniel Deronda
Later update: the abridgement is now finished and can be downloaded free in pdf, mobi or epub formats direct from my website here or in all formats from Smashwords.
In intervals of light relief from writing a children's book, I've been attempting an abridged version of Daniel Deronda - the editing of someone else's words, even George Eliot's, being much easier than the effort of creating one's own. (And more productive than Spider Solitaire.)
This seems like an extraordinarily presumptuous undertaking; but if I have learnt anything from my own writing, it is how to cut. In the short story markets that I write for, word count is crucial, and my tendency has always been to write long and end up short. The close reading of DD that this process entails has increased my already considerable respect for George Eliot: where the book seems long-winded, it is in fact very precise and detailed in its meaning. How to preserve that meaning in fewer words is proving quite a challenge.
If you fancy trying to compose your own abridgement of a public domain work, you could start as I did: download the plain text version of the book from Project Gutenberg, copy it onto Notepad to strip out excess formatting, and then back into Word where it can be edited. Unfortunately in DD's case this failed to strip out the thirty thousand or so unwanted paragraph breaks - one for every line - so a lot of reformatting has been required. The Gutenberg version also has a few errors, so I've had to keep checking it against my own C19 hardback edition with its terribly tiny print.
The abridged version won't be finished for some weeks or possibly months, when I'll put it up as a free ebook on Smashwords. It will still probably be equivalent to 400 to 500 pages (as opposed to the original's 800 to 900), but that will put it in the merely hefty category rather than the elephantine. At that length, I hope that those who have previously groaned at the prospect of tackling Daniel Deronda will give it a go. And perhaps readers who have taken up the book before, and put it down unfinished, may find this version a way back to the original; because despite its current unfashionable status compared to Middlemarch, this is a great book by a great writer, and deserves to be read.
In intervals of light relief from writing a children's book, I've been attempting an abridged version of Daniel Deronda - the editing of someone else's words, even George Eliot's, being much easier than the effort of creating one's own. (And more productive than Spider Solitaire.)
This seems like an extraordinarily presumptuous undertaking; but if I have learnt anything from my own writing, it is how to cut. In the short story markets that I write for, word count is crucial, and my tendency has always been to write long and end up short. The close reading of DD that this process entails has increased my already considerable respect for George Eliot: where the book seems long-winded, it is in fact very precise and detailed in its meaning. How to preserve that meaning in fewer words is proving quite a challenge.
If you fancy trying to compose your own abridgement of a public domain work, you could start as I did: download the plain text version of the book from Project Gutenberg, copy it onto Notepad to strip out excess formatting, and then back into Word where it can be edited. Unfortunately in DD's case this failed to strip out the thirty thousand or so unwanted paragraph breaks - one for every line - so a lot of reformatting has been required. The Gutenberg version also has a few errors, so I've had to keep checking it against my own C19 hardback edition with its terribly tiny print.
The abridged version won't be finished for some weeks or possibly months, when I'll put it up as a free ebook on Smashwords. It will still probably be equivalent to 400 to 500 pages (as opposed to the original's 800 to 900), but that will put it in the merely hefty category rather than the elephantine. At that length, I hope that those who have previously groaned at the prospect of tackling Daniel Deronda will give it a go. And perhaps readers who have taken up the book before, and put it down unfinished, may find this version a way back to the original; because despite its current unfashionable status compared to Middlemarch, this is a great book by a great writer, and deserves to be read.
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