One of the things that interests me most is that in the scenes that stayed, most of his phrasing is absolutely identical. Sure, a tiny change here and there, but only very occasional. Mostly whole scenes were cut out and replaced with something entirely different. When I read the first draft of "Bridge of Birds", the experience was quite similar. It rather surprises me - you hear a lot about revision being a slow process of repeatedly polishing a story until it shines properly. These examples suggest to me that the polishing is not so much a matter of going over phrases again and again (which I had assumed), as finding the awkward bits, cutting them out and perhaps more around them, and replacing them with large chunks of freshly-written prose.
I'm rather glad of the changes in both cases - the final draft of each is much, much better than the earlier drafts.
