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On Editing...






  The editor of My Tute Went AWOL! just reminded me: 
  'Only tell the reader what they need to know. If you want them to particularly notice or remember something, repeat it three times. In your book's prologue, why don't need to know any more than that we're in Camp Bastion outside the NAAFI, you're in a tutu and the nurse gives you some news. The rest of it needs to go: fast food prefabs, the Garrison Sergeant Major and the anecdote about someone castrating themselves with a pull-along Dyson.   
  'Think of the Prologue to The Sleeping Beauty. We learn that the fairies are coming to the christening - and are alerted to the fact that something is potentially amiss when the Master of Ceremonies insists three times - yes, your majesty, yes, your majesty, yes you halberdiers - that he has remembered to invite all the fairies. We get the arrival of the good fairies, then of the forgotten bad fairy, the curse, the mitigating of the curse. We don't get a description of the fairies' various hole-in-a-tree dwellings, their diet of conker and acorn broth or their Amazon orders for wing clippers. 

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