Abridging for broadcast

The task of the abridger is to reduce a novel to approximately a quarter of its size while maintaining spirit of the original and making sense of the plot. Typically for Radio 4’s Book of the Week or Book at Bedtime this might mean reducing a book from 80,000 words to approximately 20,000. At the outset this massive reduction can seem a daunting task, but it can be achieved in such a way that when the book is read on the radio it appears as if nothing has been lost.

Radio of course is a different medium to print, and an accomplished actor can convey a huge amount with their voice – the descriptive phrases essential on the page, hinting at a speaker’s hesitancy, anxiety, ebullience or despair, can be lost without damaging the narrative and replaced by the skillful intonation of the actor’s voice.

However, there are elements which are simply lost completely: whole scenes, characters, subplots can be removed and the book can still work; and this is what makes it such a fascinating exercise – it is like taking apart a jigsaw puzzle and fitting it back together again but ridding it of half the scenery without the disrupting the picture. You get rid of all the "unnecessary" diversions to produce a skeletal version of the narrative. It is a useful exercise for anyone who writes as it is a process of stripping down the novel to the central core of the book.

The descriptive phrases essential on the page, can be replaced by the skillful intonation of the actor’s voice

I work with Jill Waters, of The Waters Company, who is a seasoned producer of both Book at Bedtime and Book of the Week. Initially I read the book straight through to get a sense of the whole and then we ‘chunk’ the book into 10 episodes which will be around 8,000 words long. From this point it is a question of sweeping through the episodes and paring and slicing … at first we may be cutting and slashing whole pages and paragraphs, but towards the end it comes down to paring out a word here and a word there. Even then, when it is recorded it may be either longer or shorter than anticipated depending on the reader, or the number of jumps in the text for example.

This summer I worked on two first novels, Remember me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston and The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton. Both were challenging to abridge, but for different reasons. Remember Me Like This is a subtly-nuanced portrait of a family struggling to adjust to the return of their teenage son four years after he was kidnapped as a child. It is beautifully, and sparely, written which made it very difficult to abridge because the writing is so lean – there is much less to pare away. As an author Bret Anthony Johston exhibits remarkable restraint – he turns away from the horror of the abuse to depict in microscopic detail the studied avoidance of their family life.

He captures their emotional confusion with razor-sharp clarity; here, for example, is the scene in which Justin is brought to see his parents at the police station for the first time since he has been found:

And then in the doorway, a young man—tall and round-faced and shockingly, increasingly familiar, as if he were swimming toward the surface from a great depth.

The force with which the author captures this moment, as he does many others, is difficult to reduce.

The Miniaturist is set in Amsterdam, and occupies similar territory to The Girl with a Pearl Earing. It is the story of Petronella Oortman, a  young bride of the wealthy, charismatic merchant Johannes Brandt – a man she barely knows. Her husband avoids consummating their marriage and gives her instead an unusual wedding gift: a miniature replica of their house. Jessie Burton’s writing is more expansive which in one sense made this easier to abridge. However, the complex plot is woven through with clues and red herrings, and characters who reveal their true motivations and bigotry despite themselves, all of which demands a very close attention to the smallest of detail. There were simply too many strands to this plot to include them all but by stripping away all that were non-essential to the central narrative I think we found the heart of the book: in the transformation of Nella and her blossoming sense of her place, and power, in the world. And it worked I think … certainly the author seemed happy … and after all, we were simply miniaturising The Miniaturist.