How
much can you cut from a published novel—and still have it reflect
the original story?
I've
pondered that as I've been acquiring audio books for an upcoming road
trip to Phoenix, Arizona. I plan to attend a book-collector's
convention, so all summer I searched at garage sales and thrift
stores for audio books by the authors who will be attending.
The
main author has been writing since the mid 1970s, so many of his
books were published on audio cassettes. (I drive one of the last
cars built with a cassette player.) An interesting thing about those
books on tape: while a version with the entire text of a novel
contains twelve cassettes, the audio versions of some of his earlier
books contained just four. If there was comparable time on each
cassette, then only a third of the text made it onto tape.
I
can't blame just the cassettes. I've acquired some similar novels on
CD that came with five disks. But when I looked in the library for
audio books by the same authors, they contained twelve and even
fifteen.
If
you had to cut two-thirds or even half from your novel, what would
you omit—and what would be left? Listening to the five-disk version
of Jack Du Brul's adventure novel Havoc,
I was shocked to realize the entire opening chapter—fifteen pages
dramatizing a maguffin-carrying passenger's experience on the final
flight of the German airship Hindenburg—was
gone.
Better
than nothing, yet in some ways like the false-front buildings on the
street of a movie set. If you want sub-plots, don't listen to a
shortened audio version.
But
this past week I did see one book on cassette whose short original
length meant the full version could be presented on just a few
tapes—even if the labeling did make me shake my head:
The
Bridges of Madison County—Unabridged
