Trusting My Readers

I’ve been working on Cat Island, the next of the old seas stories I plan to release in ebook formats.  While I’ve generally been pleasantly surprised to read my earlier works, this is the first of the re-issues that have made me want to go through the book with a machete.  So that’s what I’m doing.

I found the first forty or fifty pages to be solid exposition, in which I catch the reader up on my main character’s history, his past naval commands, his battles, and his love life.  I also talk about his family, his crew, his mission, and his views on the political situation, both in Washington and in the Navy.

Then the scene shifts to New Orleans just before the British invasion, where I swat the reader with a fistful of new characters, some of whose histories I relate in detail.

Reading it, after all these years, I felt as if my younger self had just dropped an unabridged dictionary on my head.   A mass of vines and weeds and tumorous growths had attached themselves to my story, and were choking it to death.

So I’ve now got out my weed killer and my machete, and I’m doing combat with my own work, trying to liberate the story from the mass of clutter attached to it.

I have to wonder what I was thinking, writing it that way.  Probably I wasn’t thinking at all.  Probably I was just trying to cram everything I knew into the story, so that everything would be absolutely clear.

I was a new writer, and I was insecure.  I wasn’t trusting my reader to find his own path into the work, I was running down the path ahead of him, lighting the way not with a flashlight but with a 40,000-watt searchlight.

Here you will feel this, I say.  Here you will understand that.

Well, the hell with that!  My readers are smart enough to work out things on their own!

I’ve lightened the book by three or four thousand words in the first couple chapters, which should kick the reader into the story with greater momentum, and I’ve removed a lot of asides and redundancies, which should make it read faster.

Stand by.  Cat Island will be on your doorstep shortly.