My dad called me today to tell me that he had spent some time with my grandmother and had taken Scenting the Dark with him. We talked about the three stories he read today and it was interesting because he read drafts of the first and third but I guess never got to see the finals.
One of the things I found interesting was that on “Some Other Day” he said that the first time he read it he focused on the mosquitos and that this time he focused on the love story. The difference? I’m fairly certain I didn’t add a word. But I rearranged them. In the draft Dad read, I started with what is now the second scene in the story. It was really hard to decide to move it because it has one of the best opening lines.
“The summer the mosquitoes died began as the best one in Josie Landon’s childhood.”
I hated losing that opening line, but as my Dad has noticed, it puts all the emphasis on the mosquitoes. The published opening is “Josie Langdon leaned back from her microscope and rolled her neck to ease the kinks.”
While this opening line isn’t as attention grabbing, it sets the scene, tells you that she’s been at it a while and that she’s some sort of scientist. Two lines later I introduce the boy and this puts the emphasis on the love story by making it the first source of conflict I introduce. All by flopping the first and second scenes.
This is an example of fixing the ending of a story by changing the beginning and I’d totally forgotten that I’d done that until Dad called today. Pretty cool, huh?
Very cool! I love this sort of insight into the way people read — it’s often tricky to educe it from comments and reviews, but it’s so useful when you can get a hold of it.
My tiny ‘aha’ recently was the fact that almost every reader seems to refer to a character by nickname. The narration & protagonist did not; only one character called him that, but he spoke to him first. He named him for the readers. It’s a very tiny detail, and didn’t matter in this case, but it’s good to know for the future.
Ooo. That’s a good trick in and of itself.
I didn’t so much see the love story, but I could have sworn you ripped Josie right off of me, I identified with her that strongly. She and I are alike in many, many ways, right down to the whole father issue and yes, the significant other in the same biz showing her that she IS her own person and so on and so forth (I just woke up, I’m not fully braining yet.)
That became my favourite story quite quickly.