Ok, I’ve always wanted to be writer, but don’t have the confidence that I could pull it off. Back in the seventies, I wrote a number of letters to the editor and almost all were printed. I know they were well written, not only because of the comments I received, but also because they were printed with virtually no editing in spite of the fact that a few were rather lengthy.
Back when Reader’s Digest produced condensed books, I subscribed to them. That was when I discovered that books could indeed be condensed without losing any of their readability and without taking away any details of the story. One time I got the original book and set it along side the condensed version and saw how the editors had gone through the book line by line, eliminating superfluous words and phrases. I was somewhat amazed by how much a book could actually be reduced without any loss.
So I’ve always had it in the back of my mind to do this myself. I mean, if I don’t have the confidence to write my own plots and characters, maybe I could make long books shorter, so that more people might want to read them. And even if they don’t, it would still be fun. There are many times that I’m reading a book, and I’ll be thinking of how it would read if this and that were cut out. Is this line necessary, for example.
This led to another thought. There are a lot of rather old books that were written in different styles than people are willing to read today. I know it’s common practice for some writers to update old books into modern English, so why couldn’t I do something like that?
A few years ago, I came across an old book in a used bookstore, which I bought for $2. It’s very long by today’s standards at 754 pages and it’s written in an old English manner. It has some of my favorite things in that it’s a novel about a Biblical character, in this case, Paul. It covers the entire time period from right after Christ ascended into heaven up through the time of Paul’s death.
When I first read through it, I rather assumed that the author must be Catholic because of the way Peter is exalted in the book. In fact, Peter is called the first of the disciples and was considered the head of the church. Of course, in reality, his brother Andrew was Jesus’ first disciple, and Jesus’ brother James was the leader of the church in Jerusalem. Throughout the book there is conflict between Peter and Paul, which was true, but in the author’s mind, at the end of his life, Paul finally acknowledges that Peter was right about everything all along and he bows down to him in Rome. Talk about a vivid imagination. So I thought that the best way to rewrite such a book would be not only to bring it up to date in language, but also to “correct” as many of the author’s misconceptions as I could.
Imagine my surprise recently, when I discovered that the author was a famous Jewish writer. In fact, before writing this book about Paul, he had written a biography of the life of Christ. For writing such a blasphemous work, he was ostracized by the Jewish community and called a traitor to his faith. The book about Paul, simply entitled “The Apostle,” was his follow up book. So now I’m faced with the proposition of “correcting” a very brilliant Jew, whose mind is obviously on a higher plane than mine could ever hope to be. What could be more pretentious than that?
So of course I started working on it.
