For the last stream’s exercise, we did something we’ve done before: edit the beginning of a viewer’s story.
FateOfSilver was generous enough to allow us to use their story for the exercise. But this time, rather than completely rewrite what they had written, we instead focused on doing more detail-oriented editing. FateOfSilver had crafted a nice opening, but it was a little too fast and was missing out on some juicy specifics.
So we employed a tactic that I wrote about nearly two years ago: cracking open scenes with the Hammer of Details.
Take a look at the original and our rewrites below.
(You can read FateOfSilver’s original opening here.)
Our Rewrite:
No Debts Forgiven
By FateOfSilver
A lonely wind blows over the dusty, Texas plain. Twenty-six-year-old Janice waits in the shade of a crusty hill, her denim coat covered in sand dust, her cowboy hat well-worn from the sun. Inside her hidden respite from the blazing noonday heat, she take out her father’s Winchester from her leather holster and inspects it. An 1873 lever action rifle, ironically bought for home defense; it had never defended anything beyond the top of her parents’ dresser.
Janice couldn’t help but half-smile to herself. She used this thing on a daily basis more than her father had in his entire life. She imagined him up in heaven, looking down at her from the sky…
…and hating what she’d become.
Just beyond the horizon, a dust cloud kicks up. Horse hooves pound against the dry plains, echoing like the thunder of an impeding storm. The few birds that had nestled in the single oak tree at the top of the hill burst out of the leaves and fly away, sensing danger. Janice remembers how years ago, she’d had the same instinct to run away too. Now, suppressing a racing heartbeat and pulsing adrenaline was just part of the job.
“Right,” she mutters under her breath. “It’s time.”
As the horses gallop closer, Janice creeps up the hill and leans against the oak tree’s rough bark trunk for support. A warm breeze rustles the leaves above her as she crouches down and nuzzles the rifle’s wooden stock into her shoulder.
Her target is still a ways away, but with her hawk-like vision, Janice immediately confirms that it’s him: Larry Peppers, a.k.a. “Big Nose Larry.” His ugly mug looks exactly like it had on the wanted poster: scraggly beard, broken nose the size of a crab apple, and eyes that lookelike they were constantly pissed. He even has on his trademark leather coat with frills flaring off the sleeves and chest like worms flapping in the wind. Janice could practically smell the chewing tobacco juice pouring from his diseased gums, and the fumes of unwashed body odor wafting from his skin. Far from being a deterrent, it just made him easier-to-find prey.
Three other men accompany him on the sides. Four all together. She doesn’t recognize their faces – they’re worthless. She just has one target today. Unfortunately.
Janice brings the rifle’s sight into view. When she’d first hefted it so long ago, it had felt brand new, almost foreign. But now, after many outings together, the rifle had learned to embrace the contours of her grip. It used to be a mere weapon, but now it’s a part of her. She slowly wraps her finger around the trigger, letting her flesh become one with the metal. She closes her left eye and focuses aim on Peppers.
Her eye become the rifle’s eye. Her mind becomes the rifle’s mind, both of them working in unison towards a single, solitary purpose. Without even needing to think about it, she calculates the distance and trajectory and lines up the barrel to compensate. Target is five hundred and twenty two feet away. Traveling at a speed of thirty one miles per hour. Wind speed is sixteen miles per hour.
This would be easy.
The squeeze of the trigger comes as natural as blinking. The pound of the internal hammer as familiar as her heartbeat. The .45 caliber round casing cuts through the dry, summer air, slicing through Peppers’s ugly nose and lodging itself into his brain. He collapses to the cracked Earth from his horse and lies motionless on the ground.
Janice lets her rifle relax. She feels nothing except satisfaction. Another job well done. Another sunny day in Texas.
What do you think of the difference between the two openings? I think the original had a lot of good going for it: interesting setting, interesting character, and good tension, but it moved too fast for its own good. Before we got to enjoy any of the cool things, they were already over and we’d moved onto something new.
Our goal for the rewrite was to remain true to the spirit of the original while expanding on the details — really cracking open those eggs! I think we accomplished what we wanted to: hint at a troubled past, show her cold-killer instincts, and describe the historical setting, all while making the pacing enjoyable for the reader.
You can watch us write/read the story here.
After that we did a writing prompt and chat voted for this one submitted by DeadWombats: A time traveler appears before you. “I need to make this quick: you play a vital role in the future of humanity.” You ask, “Am I going to save the world?” The man bends down to pet your dog. “No. He is.”
Since we spent so long on the editing exercise, chat threw in an extra restriction: our story could only be 300 words long. That added a fun extra layer of challenge to it, since we had a lot of explaining to do in such a short time.
I think we succeeded pretty well. In fact, the only hard part was choosing from all the cool ways we came up with for a dog to save the world. In the end, we combined a couple of them into our final product. I love how it turned out, especially the ending.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 7:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch Rubbish to Published, the writing exercises, or the writing prompts on YouTube, or watch the full stream reruns until Twitch deletes them.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon, forthcoming November 2018.