Revision Notes

If you’re reading this then I assume that you’ve already read both versions of ‘The Passage of Pearl’ included in this volume. As this essay will discuss some of the changes I’ve made and my reasoning behind those changes, I will bring up points that you might consider spoilers. If you haven’t read at least one version of ‘The Passage of Pearl’, consider yourself warned of spoilers.

This essay will, as I said, focus on some of the changes I’ve made to the story between drafts and my reasoning for those changes. To do that, I should start off with the story of how this tale came to be written and then a brief look at why this edition is structured the way that it is.

Back in 2012, I joined with a Crowdfunding Creative Jam held on DreamWidth. It’s also held on LJ, so it should be pretty easy to find. One of the prompts was “the curious incident of the dragon in the library” and… that’s how Pearl showed up. More or less. That’s what inspired The Passage of Pearl anyway. It sat around my hard drive for a few weeks as I mulled it over and then started writing. The shorter, original version shared here is actually a fifth draft, but it hasn’t changed overly much since its beginning. The changes were mostly cosmetic, typos and clearing up grammatical issues and the like. I didn’t add much or remove much.

I’ve chosen to present that fifth draft last partially so that the version that people will read when sampling is the one that I published in Feather by Feather and Other Stories. It’s strategically putting the better story first in hopes of garnering more sales, but it’s also a question of which version do I want people to have read last before diving into these notes. And I want people to have read the shorter version last, so that the things that I cut out and changed will stand out more strongly. Hopefully that will aid interested readers in understanding what I changed and why.

The biggest change is, of course, the length. The original version of ‘The Passage of Pearl’ was 4,000 words long. The final version is almost 13,000. That’s a good three times longer than the tale originally was. Put differently, the word count grew by 320%. Authors are often if not always advised to cut down on their word count instead of adding in more. Like with most advice, it doesn’t go for every occasion. I routinely underwrite and underwrite badly. One of the other projects I’m working on this year was supposed to be a short story of about 6,000 words. The rough draft for that ended up being over 26,000 words. It’ll be longer before I’m done and that story, much like this story, needs those extra words if I’m to tell the story properly.

That’s why ‘The Passage of Pearl’ got so much bigger, though it’s for a reason different from why I usually underwrite. With this story the problem is that there were several scenes that I should have had and that I didn’t, actually, have. I’ve always jokingly described this story as a slice-of-life vignette of university life that briefly intersects with an actual plot. Trouble is that the original draft is unbalanced in that regard. We get a slice-of-life introduction, the story discovers a plot and then forgets that it was supposed to be a slice-of-life, nothing exciting, nothing too creepy story. Just a ‘day in the life of’ little piece about the stresses of being a university student in a secondary fantasy world.

There are several ways to deal with a balance issue like that. You can take out one half of the equation so the balance doesn’t matter or you can try to even out the scales. I opted for the latter, and that meant adding scenes to balance out the sections where Pearl obsesses over the book. It’s clearest in the ending since that’s the part that needed the most work.

In the original draft, I ended the story right after the plot strand is resolved. Pearl has handed the book over to someone else, normal life can resume. Huzzah! And that’s it. The reader doesn’t get to see that normal life afterwards, or Pearl’s return to it. I felt (and still feel) that, though clichéd, the final line of the original draft is a powerful image to end the story on.

“But when she walked out of the magical library, she felt light enough to fly, even in her wrong, wingless shape,” goes the ending. The relief that Pearl feels at being rid of the book is so great that, even weighed down by a body she’s not comfortable in, she could fly as she feels she should be able to do. It combines Pearl’s personality and beliefs with the plot of the story and ties them together and that is the image the reader is left with. If I’d written a story that was all about the way Pearl obsesses over the book she’s found, this is where I’d end it. If I’d wanted to write that story, she would have found that book on her first on-screen visit to the library and gone straight home. And the reader wouldn’t have had much of a reason to care about Pearl, as a person, because there’d have been no time to establish her personality prior to her obsession.

To do that, to show that, I had to show the aftermath of the book as well. I had to show how Pearl returns to her old self and old life, how she deals with the essay she still hasn’t written and the classes she’s missed. It circles the story back to the kind of scene it started with: a student doing research for an essay and going to classes. Plus, the essay was essentially what started the whole mess with the book obsession, so it shouldn’t be chucked to the wayside for no good reason.

The framework is whole now. In the original draft, more than half of the text is about Pearl’s adventures in researching her essay, and once she finds the creepy book that essay never shows up again. Now it does. I had to add a good 2,000 words to the ending to allow it to end in a way that works better for the story, and that’s roughly a quarter what I added in total.

Yet, despite all those changes I made and all those words I added, the story still ends on a similar note. The final version ends with Pearl toasting to her life and her identity. The original doesn’t carry the same celebratory tone, but it does carry the same affirmation of Pearl’s identity.

Initially, I was hesitant to change the ending. I liked that image, but the more I worked on it for the collection, the more I realised that it really couldn’t serve as the ending. I did keep the original image, but I toned it down a little by making sure it wasn’t the last sentence of a scene.

In creating the framework of the story, I also slanted it more heavily towards showing readers how Pearl’s life is structured around reading and her courses. Most of the words I added were added to expand upon the student life that she lives. It’s still a slice-of-life vignette that intersects with an actual plot, but the way that plot takes over the story for the duration in the final version is far more in keeping with the way that it takes over Pearl’s life within the story itself.

Now, because the reader has a better idea of what that life was like and who Pearl is as a person, that obsession hits more strongly. Pearl isn’t the most social of creatures, but she’s not anti-social either. Expanding on the meeting with her classmates and lecturers helps to show that she’s not as anti-social as she may initially appear. There’s more room to show how much Pearl loves books and her classes. The Pearl readers get to know is a young woman who is passionate about her classes and wouldn’t miss them for any reason. That, at least, was my intention. I won’t have succeeded for everyone.

A better sense of how Pearl lives her life means that the loss of those things impacts the reader more than when that life has only been hinted at. When it’s only hinted at there is very little for the reader to miss and so there’s little for the reader to empathise or sympathise with. Some stories are more tolerant of hinting, but this, I believe, is not one of them, so it had to become more visible and stronger.

Another aspect that’s seen a dramatic change between the final version and the shorter draft is Pearl’s synaesthesia. I’m not proud of my decision to take it out. I can count the number of times I’ve read a story about someone with synaesthesia on one hand, and that was a story about having synaesthesia. Pearl was a protagonist whose synaesthesia had nothing to do with the plot. It influenced her perception of the world and… that was it. It just was because it was. Characters like that are important too. And I took it out of the story.

Pearl’s synaesthesia played a large role in the delay I had getting Feather by Feather and Other Stories ready for publication. Because I was adding so much to the story, I started to fret and worry at it. What if I got it wrong? What if I didn’t get the balance right? What if I forgot to include it in places and descriptions where I could have, should have?

I asked some beta readers to help make sure that Pearl’s synaesthesia read all right to them, but they couldn’t get back to me in a reasonable time frame. (That’s not their fault, though! I asked at superbusy times for them and failed to poke them about it. I hope they don’t feel bad about it.) So I panic-flailed until I got to a point where I was either going to have to take the synaesthesia out entirely or cut the story from the collection entirely until an indefinite time. Since ‘The Passage of Pearl’ is, in my opinion, one of the strongest stories in the collection, I felt that I couldn’t leave it out.

So I did something I had never done before: I rewrote it and toned down Pearl’s synaesthesia as much as I possibly could without breaking the story. Cutting everything out probably took more time than fixing it up would have taken, as it was a pretty integral part of Pearl’s perception. It soothed my worries, but, as I said, I’m not proud of it, but it was something I needed to do for myself. There are always more stories to tell and I look forward to telling them and then sharing them.

I hope you’ve enjoyed ‘The Passage of Pearl’ and this brief look at part of the revision process that the story has gone through.