Recently, a friend of L’s who is an editor at Holt, Rinehart & Winston (the textbook-publishing arm of Harcourt, Brace & Co.) offered me some freelance writing and editing work on a couple of her projects, writing summaries and redactions of stories in their elementary and middle-school literature series. I’m supposed to be writing the story summaries for fourth-grade level, and the re-tellings at low sixth-grade. Wednesday, I sent off my first “re-telling,” of Mark Twain’s “The Lowest Animal,” and got it back from the her with initial reaction and comments. She thought I did an excellent job of keeping Twain’s style while simplifying his language—even said that “an alarming number” of teachers might not even recognize it for a rewrite unless they pulled the original and compared the two. Unfortunately, I ran several hundred words longer than she wanted. I gave her a piece the same length as the original (1,900 words), while she was hoping for 1,000 to 1,200. In the evening I started looking for parts of it I could cut without destroying the text, and finally got down to just over 1,400 words, which is 75% of the original. I haven’t heard any more from her yet, but I suspect she’s in bed with the Crud that’s going around, which would explain it.
The next one she’s given me to tackle is “The Pit and the Pendulum,” which is going to be nasty to do. I can cut it easily—Poe’s language and syntax are so ornate that a good quarter of the story could go without disturbing the narrative—but trying to keep the tale’s feel and language while cutting it down for struggling sixth-grade readers is going to be a task.
An evil asphalt is intelligent. Fnord.
