When I wrote my first draft and my friends read my first chapter there was a lot of excitement. Yes, it was long (57 pages!) it was full of errors and just generally needed tightening and shortening, but it entertained nonetheless and my friends wanted to read on. Success!
They also encouraged me to make the book suitable for publication so I always had that option, even though I started out writing purely for my own pleasure. It didn't seem like much of a stretch to work out how to make smaller chapters, bring the book down to a publishable size etc.
But chopping the book meant making some hard decisions, losing characters, sacrificing sub-plots and losing some of what people had enjoyed. I justified it as necessary because that is what everyone does. And the cuts were all over the book, but the first 57 pages were hit hardest. They now stand at 34 pages and when someone read the first 20 or so recently her comment was that I appeared to be hurrying through far too fast, that scenes should be opened out and that some of the narrative had become synopsis-like in my haste. I saw what I could do to the chapter to make the transitions smoother and show just the most important information on the characters, skipping the tell, but I stopped short of making the changes. I know why. Those original 57 pages are still in a box next to me and how different they were to the extract she had read. My heart wants to open the box and let out the original 57. That chapter just sang in a way the replacement doesn't.
What would you do? Would you open the box and re-cut the original (this was a job and a half the first time and there is no guarantee I would do it better) or would you take the 34 pages you have and restructure?
Actually, Jonathan, the comparison is good. I'm supposed to have written a romantic fiction and in that first section she couldn't have anything further from her mind. The set up of their friendship and his unusual temperament is so important. I show key moments of their early friendship highlighting his odd behaviour. One thing I like to try to remember is that we are writing our own book and while it should follow a genre, following a prescriptive style would be dull for the reader.
Sonya, I had two wonderful readers read at exactly the same time whose tastes were entirely different. If their opinions conflicted then I knew it was just a matter of taste. If they agreed something was good or bad, that could be trusted. It was really helpful.
Thanks for all your input, everyone. Time to open the box.
I would try and get back to the original 54 page longer version which your friends first appreciated and you loved as well. Ofcourse be consistent with the changes you made later, so it might not be exactly the same chapter, but close to it. Ofcourse 54 pages is a VERY long chapter.
I find this a frustrating example of feedback-one reader will love a part that another will not. And you delete a part in good faith, only to be told-why on earth wasn't there more explanation? And so it is easy to go round and round in circles, removing and putting back parts in a never ending edit. Even a professional opinion will have its limits, after all it is just another opinion. But if it is from someone who had read the entire book, loved it and got your concept , then I would value the feedback more than if it was from someone who just read one chapter.
In the end, you have to follow your gut instinct. If you think the editing has removed things you loved about your book, then that is very tough. Editing should just make your book better, not worse. Does that kind of answer your question?
I feel your pain to a great degree.
We're always told 'get straight into the action'. But with my first story, I couldn't. It's about two young men: how they met and their relationship developed is integral to their actions and how both were perceived when they later joined the army. This means through two-thirds of the book there's no real fighting, not how military fiction, even a historical, is supposed to be written. And the book's been criticised for that.
But I think without all those scenes the story - which is really about the trials of friendship, not war - wouldn't have worked half so well in terms of making the characters real.
It's difficult for me to advise with any certainty because only you know your book. But if it were me I'd be reluctant to bin a version that elicited such an emotion response from readers simply on the grounds it made the whole thing too long. You'd be spoiling the ship: editing the guts out based on one opinion.
I once had a short professional edit of my first chapter. Some of what the editor said was relevant but a lot of it was unnecessary alteration, in my view, for no better result than some over-flowery prose.
Go with your gut feeling. I do. Okay, I make mistakes, but they're MY mistakes, and on balance they're fewer than my good decisions.
That does tend to happen as you get older ;)