There's nothing I hate more than trimming my work.
...and there's nothing my work needs more than trimming.
This is the unfortunate paradox of going through and editing my work, trying to streamline it to move the reader as quickly as possible through my typically slower starts and towards the real meat of the story. Today as I continue editing Chapter Two of The Engineer's Craft, I'm finding a lot of opportunities to trim or at least rearrange paragraphs that I've written. I've realized that I have a habit of splitting an important thought/conversation/idea/beat between two different scenes in a first draft. I'll write it out, get a few scenes later, and realize that no, this is where that should go.
What this means for editing is that the first version of that conversation then becomes superfluous--I'm telling the reader in the wrong spot about key information and slowing down the journey.
Such is the case with introducing the reader to the idea of conflicting religions in the Republic of Metirno. Bartus gets on the ship and listens in on an alchemist and a woman talking. Bartus thinks about the prejudices that exist against the alchemists. He thinks about the Luminaries, the Qamanists, and the alchemists and how they all function. Then later, he gets home and he talks to his parents who tell him that his youngest brother was saved by an alchemist. We get another navel-gazey moment where he thinks about what his parents taught him when he was younger.
With this rewrite, I'm placing more emphasis on the differences between these scenes.
In the first, Bartus no longer thinks so directly about the alchemist's place in the Republic. He merely thinks "huh, this isn't what I expected" and then moves back to his feelings of guilt.
In the second, I'm moving his thoughts about judgement (Perdition) and Hidran and what he's been taught surrounding letting foreign magic touch you. Now that I've finished the book, I see that a big theme is "what happens when another's faith produces miracles?", and so I want to highlight that in the interaction with his youngest sibling and his parents' explanation of the healing. This will help to bring the theme earlier in the novel, raising it as a question from the start rather than as an afterthought halfway through the book when Bartus first runs into Mauv.
(Note to self: have Bartus think more directly about baby Sorend's healing when he talks to Mauv about natural forces and how the gods of the archipelago might all come from one source)