When You Have Too Many Words....

I was just asked for a few tips on cutting big bunches of words. You know, you were aiming for a nice 75K novel, only this ended up at 95K words.  And from your perspective, it works! But it's too long for the line or the editor or the type of story, right? So how can you trim words without deleting meaning? 

It's hard. It can be done. I had to cut 35K from one of my books once, and it was hard, but I don't think afterwards the reader could tell what was missing. (Okay, okay. Theresa did most of the cutting. I did most of the whining and whimpering.)

While the plan here is not to go back, it can really help to think that nothing you're doing is permanent, that if you realize you cut something important, you can restore it. So be sure to 

 save the original version first, then save the version-to-be-cut under another filename. Just in case you want to UNcut later!

But here are some tips if you want to cut 20K words:

1) The first option is to cut a whole scene. That's a broadsword rather than a scalpel approach, but let's say you wrote this book in a white heat during Nanowrimo. There are probably scenes you wrote or started to write which ended up as unimportant or irrelevant, or you later did a better version and both versions are still in there. 

A whole scene might well be 5,000 words. That's a pretty good cut! And cutting it might make for a stronger, tighter plot. Then again, you might accidentally cut out something essential like a clue, or an important step on your character's journey, or the satisfying "reunion" scene the reader has been waiting for. 

To do this, however, you have to look at scenes not as groups of words but as part of the action of the plot. So try this: Outline the book as you have it. Yep, a scene outline. List -- in order they occur, every chapter, and every scene or scenelet or passage (complete or not) within each chapter. 

Then you can evaluate if there are scenes that can be deleted without causing plot/emotion problems.  

2. Look also for adjacent scenes that can be combined.  That will let you delete some of the set up and transition between scenes. Be watching for "single-purpose" scenes, especially several in a row-- a scene where he argues with his brother, and then a scene were he discovers a clue to the mystery, and then a scene where he travels to where the robbery took place. You could combine those into one scene where he argues with his brother, leaves and discovers the clue, and ends with him deciding to go to the robbery site. Really, once you start looking at what happens from scene to scene, you might find several which can be combined.

3.  If you can't cut a whole scene, look for passages (especially at the beginning) which are mostly set-up. That's where I found the most opportunities to trim, at the start of scenes, where I might have spent a couple pages describing the setting and establishing what the characters are doing there. 

Here are some other "cutting" options:

4) Look for mini-scenes (I call them "scenelets"-- 1-2 page bridges usually from one important event to the next) that don't much matter. Often these involve a main character interacting with a minor character or a "walk-ons" like a waiter who will never be seen again in the book. An example might be a cab ride to the convention hotel. There might be good character interplay with the cabdriver and give a good sense of the main character's mood, but if you want to cut, that's an example of a good 'non-essential' scenelet. Usually these aren't full scenes but intros to more important scene passages. You can always argue how this bit is important or clever or enlightening, but you know, you have to trim something, and a scene without an event to change the plot is usually trimmable.

5) Try the Jane Austen tactic-- in dialogue, if there's no conflict, do narrative summary. (They reminisced for a few minutes, then she remembered, and said insultingly, " ". :) There are going to be parts of scenes the reader needs that might have no conflict (like a moment of grace where two characters share a cigarette), but those are best kept fairly short and fairly rare. 

6) Look for those passages where there's nothing-dialogue-- often when there's some movement from one setting to another. ("Let's go into the den and watch TV/What do you want to watch?/ I thought this season of The Voice was starting. Did you record that?/No, the last one was so annoying, I didn't bother. But we can probably get it on-demand." :) No, I never actually wrote that passage, but that's the sort of "transition conversation" that's usually easy to cut away.

7) Also look for long passages of introspection where a character is thinking. Sometimes these are important, and the way they think is important to show, but the deeper we get into the story, the less long introspection is needed. (The reader knows more about the character by the middle of the book, and probably just needs a hint of what they're thinking, or only introspection when something unexpected is felt and needs explanation.)

8) Try my ruthless technique: Decide on a page goal, like "cut 50 words out of this page". This takes awhile, but it's usually easy to find at least 20 words to cut. Or "cut one sentence or sentence part out of each paragraph". Or "trim two sentences and combine them into one shorter sentence". This is actually my favorite thing. :)

9) Even more ruthless: If you know there are words you over-use (for me, it's "then" and "just"), do a "find" for them and for each one, decide whether it's needed. Delete if not. A friend of mine cut two pages out just by getting rid of justs. :)

Because all this is so "voice-centric," it's probably best to do it yourself first and see how much you can cut. That way you'll still have control of the scenes and the interactions between characters and how that's presented. 

Then again, an outsider might be able to be more objective, as Theresa was with my over-long book.

I can tell you from experience, trimming is hard to get started, and painful, but after awhile, it's easier to see where something can be discarded, or  how scenes or sentences can be combined.

Broadsword/scalpel experiences you can share? 

Alicia

Sequencing action in a sentence with verbing

(I think I made the word "verbing" up.)

One task of revision is to make sure that sentences make sense. There's the semantic sense-- the reader understand easily what you mean. (Harder than it sounds, ain't it?) Then there's the sequence of action. I try to revise sentences to be coherent, that is, if there would be a pause between actions, then I try to put them in different clauses or different sentences.

This isn't a rule or anything, but there's some sense here. If you have a group of actions that take a couple minutes to perform-- getting the groceries out of the car, carrying them up the stairs and into the kitchen, unloading them and putting them away-- well, the reader isn't going to get much sense of the experience if you jam all that into one long sentence that takes two seconds to read. If you group the actions together (carrying upstairs and into kitchen could be a one-sentence group), then you'd have two or three sentences which would take a longer time to read, echoing the longer time it would take to do that sequence of actions. If this long sequence of action isn't important enough for three sentences (and the grocery sequence probably isn't), then consider skipping the earlier actions and use the latter one as a quick narrative bridge, relegated to a dependent element connected to a more meaningful main clause, like:
(The reader will assume she somehow got the groceries into the kitchen.)
Halfway through putting the groceries away, she found the wine underneath the 12-grain bread and sat down to get moodily drunk.

There's an interrupted action there, then a new action coming out of the initial action/interruption. I notice that I've got verbals (a verbal is a form of the verb which won't be a predicate, like "putting" and "to get") which refer to the things that don't happen right then-- the "putting" is interrupted, and she "sits down to get drunk"-- that is, we know she's going to get drunk, but within this 10 seconds or so, she just sits down TO GET drunk.

Is this important? Well, maybe not, but using verbals rather than actual verbs is a subtle way to indicate un-actions-- things that don't quite happen or don't fully happen. Would there be a difference if we stressed the actions that weren't completed in the original? I don't know. Let's see:

She put half the groceries away, then found the wine underneath the 12-grain bread and sat down and got moodily drunk.

In this case, the main clause action is putting half the groceries away (She put) rather than "she found" the wine as it had been in the previous version. Which is more important? For my purposes, what was more important was this almost accidental "finding" of the wine which leads to her quitting what she'd been doing (putting away the groceries) and embarking on a, shall we say, less productive plan.

What happens when the drunk part stops being a intended/prospective thing (to get drunk) and becomes a certain thing (got drunk)? My main problem with that is that getting drunk takes some time, while the earlier part of the sentence could be measured in a minute or so. So we'd have a sequence of actions that might take a minute (stopping the grocery putting away, finding the wine, (presumably opening it-- probably it's a screwtop :), sitting down), and then at the end of the sentence, an action (getting drunk) that would on its own take, well, even if she's very determined, ten minutes.

In contrast, "sat down to get drunk" -- that is, sitting down with the intention to get drunk-- would take only the amount of time it takes to sit down. (Intending, alas, takes no time at all.)

So... no rules here! But as you revise, look at a sentence or sequence of sentences where there is a group of actions. How can you give the reader the experience of this span of time and motion? What actually happens, what almost happens, what might still happen, what was meant to happen but never did? Is there some way to indicate which action falls into what category?
And what is the most important action? Should that be in the main clause?
Do you have too much for one sentence?

I am puzzling right now over a sentence where the man takes several actions in sequence. They're important in aggregate (he's coming forward to confess to a murder), but one isn't that much more important than another. 


Before she could answer, Winstead rose suddenly, pushing back his chair with a clatter, and stepped in front of his wife.   
Right away I see the problem that "she" (who couldn't answer in time) and "his wife" are the same person, so .... ugly....! And heck, why not dialogue it, huh?
"Don't answer that!" Winstead rose suddenly....
Hmm. Suddenly-- to convey that, I think I'll make it the harder-sounding word "abruptly" and put it first so that it's an interruption--
"Don't answer that!" Abruptly Winstead rose....


I have "rose" and "stepped in front" as equal in importance (both are verbs/predicates, which is fine), and pushing the chair back relegated to a participial phrase, so that's okay too, I think. The sequence wouldn't take long physically, so one sentence would be about right. I do notice that the rising and the pushing back are probably actually one motion-- or? Let me act it out. (One moment please. :) Well, you can push the chair back a bit by the act of rising, but you can't really push it very far, and I do mean this to be emphatic. 
Question for me: Look at the "and". Does the pushing back motion go better with the "rose" or better when the stepping in front?


"Don't answer!" Abruptly Winstead rose, pushing back his chair with a clatter, and stepped in front of his wife.

or


"Don't answer!" Abruptly Winstead rose, and pushing back his chair with a clatter, stepped in front of his wife.

I like the feel of the second, but I don't think it's entirely logical as the participle means that he's more or less simultaneously pushing and stepping.

I think I'll get rid of the pushing. :)

"Don't answer!" Abruptly Winstead rose and stepped in front of his wife.

Not much of a sequence of motion, but at least it's physically logical. 

You can see why it takes me so long to edit my books. I fret about this sort of stuff.

What are some motion-sequence sentences of yours? Can you make them more logical and coherent?

Alicia

Testing the Middle: Subplots

A few days ago, we talked about some simple tests for the end of a book to make sure it fits the story and reads smoothly. In response to that post, someone asked me to do a similar post on the middles of books.

Middles are hard! They're like Tolstoy's families -- good middles share similar characteristics, but every bad middle is bad in its own way. For this reason,  it's hard to say with any specificity how to fix a bad middle, because every bad middle is going to require a different kind of fix. That said, I can tell you some of the things I look at when I examine the rising action. First up, subplots.

Subplots create a lot of problems for a lot of books, and a junky subplot can confuse the reader and create a drag on the rising action as much as a junky main plot. We see a wide variety of subplot issues -- wandering action, irrelevant ideas, dull secondary conflicts, characters that are taking over when they shouldn't, conflicts that are overwhelming the main conflicts, and so on. When a book has subplots, there are a few things I do during the structural analysis to test the subplot.


First, I question whether the entire subplot is necessary. There's a great way to test the necessity of a subplot to the main plot. Look at the moment when the subplot is resolved. Does its resolution change the course of the main plot's action? If so, the subplot is necessary to the main plot. Next, we have to evaluate whether every scene in the subplot (not just that final scene) is necessary to reach the point where the main plot and subplot intersect. This isn't too difficult -- just take the subplot moment by moment and figure out which are absolutely necessary. There should be a pretty clean chain of causation in these subplot events. Anything not a part of that chain of causation can probably be cut.

Necessity isn't strictly, er, necessary. A subplot can serve functions other than pure plot functions. So if the subplot does not change the course of the main plot's action, I start looking for a non-plot purpose for the subplot. Perhaps the characters in the subplot are foils to the characters in the main plot. Perhaps there's thematic relevance. Perhaps the author is building a motif or a parallel scene to enhance the structure. There are legitimate reasons other than plot which would lead an author to write a subplot, and those reasons usually manifest in what I call echoes.

Echoes are little more than subplot aspects which resemble aspects of the main plot in some ways. Whether in foils, themes, motifs, parallels, or any other kind of non-plot element, relevant subplot echoes will relate in some way back to the main plot. That relationship will serve to underscore the element in the main plot -- that is, the subplot serves the main plot by making some aspect of the main plot feel more significant through repetition or reversal.

So first, I have to identify the ways in which these echoes exist on the page. And then I check whether those echoes are strong and meaningful enough to warrant the continued existence of the subplot. This requires a bit of subjective analysis, and it's not easy to say, "THIS is how you measure these kinds of echoes." All I can say is that, if it feels weak, it's weak. If it feels irrelevant, it's irrelevant. That doesn't necessarily mean it has to be cut, but it will need to be fixed.

So, on to the fixing. In general, I find that the first and last scenes in a subplot are the ones that count. This isn't always true, of course, but it's true more often than not. So I start with those two scenes, and I look at what is being accomplished in those scenes. Do the scenes in their entirety echo the main plot? Or is it only certain aspects of the scenes which contain echoes? Because the first and last scenes of the subplot anchor the subplot to the main plot in a more direct way, those echoes should be strong and clear. Those echoes should dominate those scenes. If they don't, we have to find a way to make them so.

Once the anchor scenes are solid, I turn to the middle scenes in the subplot thread. It frequently happens that an author will build an entire scene in the middle of subplots to accomplish something very small. So I look at those scenes and try to isolate the important echo bits. Can any of those bits be moved into other scenes? If so, do it and cut the unimportant parts. In fact, that's pretty good advice for any kind of scene -- figure out what's important in the scene, and cut the rest. But it's even more vital to do this in subplots, which need greater justification to survive the editorial ax.

At this point, we should have two solid anchor scenes and some bits or even full scenes remaining. Now I look at this collection of pages and paragraphs, and I try to determine patterns. With good, well-developed echoes, they will probably reappear in various forms and at various times throughout the text, but they will tie into a single concept -- so, for example, if water is a motif, and it's being used to develop the idea that secrets cannot be contained, the text will show streams, bottles of water, rain, swimming pools, and similar water elements at various moments. Do those water elements appear when the secrets are relevant to the action? They should, if that's the purpose of the motif. So, if you have a subplot scene with characters drifting lazily downriver on inner tubes, but none of those characters are worried about keeping or revealing a secret, then the scene is only accomplishing half its job. Either supply the other half in revision, or cut the scene.

Sometimes it will happen that an echo will be a one-off. That is, the particular echo will appear one time only in the course of the entire novel. That makes it a likely candidate for cutting, but it can be spared if that single instance is important enough to change substantially the way a reader interprets a text. This is more likely to happen if the echo is symbolic -- think of Eve in the garden eating the apple of knowledge. She only ate one apple, and she only ate it once. So even though it doesn't recur in the way a motif would recur, it's important enough that the entire story of the garden of Eden would fall apart without it. (Yes, that's a main plot, not a subplot, but you get the idea.)

As I mentioned, it's very hard to diagnose subplot problems in the abstract, but this is more or less the method I use when analyzing subplots. It all boils down to relevance, and generally, the result of this process is a pile of scraps on the cutting room floor.

Theresa

Word by word

I'm looking for examples of how you have changed or improved a scene with just a word or two. Reinforced a theme, made a real conclusion, redirected attention, hid a clue, something.

This comes up because a critiquer had set up a theme of "lady"-- that is, that in this time and place, there were strict rules of what constituted ladylike behavior. And I was thinking that maybe this theme could be subtly reinforced just by using the word "lady" in the last paragraph, so that "A good girl would never do that" might be revised to "a lady would never do that."

Wes, I remember in our class you were changing a line like "I never thought it would be this way" to "I never thought it would end this way," expressing more finality (he's about to die).

Any other examples of where you've changed a simple word or phrase and it made a big difference?

Alicia

Brainstorming Metaphors

A dead metaphor or other overworked bit of comparative language can break the reader bond, Gardner's "fictive dream" state, by boring the reader. Cliches fail to engage the imagination, and they expose weak spots in the writer's thought process. They will still creep into first drafts -- it's inevitable, especially during fast drafts. NaNo, anyone? But it's important to cull them during revisions and replace them with more apt language.

Brainstorming a new metaphor is not all that difficult. Let's say you have a real clunker, a horrid, turgid, dull simile that would make any worthy reader groan: "Her swan-like neck" used to describe a romance heroine in an intimate scene. Ugh. I cringe. Bet you do, too.

There are at least two ways to brainstorm new descriptive language there. The first is to tackle it from the underlying concept. In this case, the swan-like appearance of the neck refers to length and slenderness rather than to feathers or whiteness or twisty flexibility. So think about other things that are long and slender. Don't worry about whether they make sense. Just list as many as you can think of:

rebar, downspouts, those long skinny balloons, string, spider legs, a garden hose, kudzu vines, hanging moss, icicles, a silk scarf, butterfly feelers

As you see, the results can be mixed -- which is fine, because this kind of creative flexing will never hurt you, and because some of these images might be useful later even if you don't use them now. Some of them lose the sense of flexibility (rebar? honestly, it was the first long skinny thing I thought of, and that is just SAD), and some of them connote things you might not want to incorporate (icicles = cold, frigid, immobile). But eventually, you'll hit on something that might work and won't bore the crap out of your readers. I'm kinda grooving on that hanging moss image as something very organic and natural and tactile, but it has connotations that might prohibit its use in a particular scene.

The other method is to chain ideas starting with the comparison itself. In this case, we would start with the swan's neck, which might take us to giraffe necks, which might take us to elephant trunks, which might take us to steamer trunks, which might take us to steamer ships, which might take us to a graceful column of steam emitting from a chimney. Hmm. Maybe there's something in that image. Or maybe not. Maybe we need to start over again -- swan neck, to swan beak, to trumpets, to horns, to strings, to the long throat of a bass and the musician's hands moving up and down its length -- this might work. Physical love as a symphony has been used before, but maybe not this particular image in this particular way. Is it remote enough from existing cliches to work? (Side note: I don't ever want to see the word crescendo in a sex scene again.)

In any case, playing with these two techniques during revision will eventually lead you to a fresher idea than the one you had before. Once you've found your comparative language, the next step is examining it in the context of the scene. You want something that either fits in so smoothly that it won't jar the reader out of the context, or you want something so jarring that it requires explanation and behaves like a conceit. Generally, especially in genre fiction, choose the smooth over the jarring. These readers aren't there to groove on your philosophical constructs, but they do want a great, dynamic, engrossing story. Smooth, fresh language can help you deliver that to them.

Theresa

What to leave out

What to Leave Out

Whether we like it or not, most books are shorter now than were their counterparts twenty years ago. Blame it on attention deficit, paper costs, whatever you want, but many stories now are more compressed. It's not necessarily that the plots have fewer events, but rather that there's little room for anything that doesn't directly affect the story. Those fun meanders into whale biology (thank you, Herman Melville) or digressions into the third most important family in town or backstory about the heroine's previous marriage, are less likely to make it into print.

That's because editors are probably going to cut all that. And so I'd suggest, save time and don't write it. Leave it out.

In fact, if you streamline your scenes, you might just have a bit of room for that backstory about her previous marriage if you can make it fit (I fear whale biology, however, is gone for good).

So a few thoughts on what to leave out, that is, what I as an editor would probably cut out, starting with the least painful:

1. Roundabout scene openings. If there was ever a time when you could start a scene with the character waking up, getting up, brushing teeth, reading the newspaper, sipping coffee, and finally, finally getting into the car and driving to work, where she is met by her boss who gives her a new assignment (the action of the scene), that time is over. Those "getting up" scene openings are a waste of print. They are usually the writer's attempt to "write around" until he finds the actual scene opening. Write around all you want, find the true scene opening (where, um, something important is about to happen), and then go back and cut all that junk.

2. Irrelevant events within scenes. Okay, say the heroine is given the assignment of interviewing the new mayor at his downtown club. Think about where you're going to end up. Say the mayor fields all her questions with aplomb, but when she asks a question supplied by her grizzled old colleague, the mayor gets all flustered and then abruptly stands up and leaves. So you know what the scene is aiming for—her realization that the grizzled old colleague has something on the mayor. Well, aim for that. Leave out anything that doesn't add to setting that up. That includes the whole "ordering lunch" digression. Okay, maybe that's not your choice of digression, but I've seen exactly that so many times I gave it a name, the "Waitress Digression." That's when the waitress comes over and we're treated to a play-by-play –

"Hello, I'm Judy. I'll be your server today."

"Hello, Judy. I'll start out with a martini. And get the young lady a – what?"

"An iced tea."

"And bring some of that bread, will you? I'm starved."

Etc., etc.

You think I'm kidding? I've seen these trivial encounters go on for pages, the characters debating the merits of red sauce or white sauce, the waitress reciting the specials, the viewpoint character making judgments about the mayor based on his selections, the mayor flirting with the waitress, on and on.

Do we really need to know all that? Really? Why? If you say, "Well, it reveals the mayor's personality, how charming he is," I have to ask, if that isn't revealed by the actual action of the plot, the actual meaningful interactions of the characters, why not? Don't relegate important character development to nothing-events. After all, we readers, who have probably been in restaurants before and ordered lunch too, are likely to skim that passage, and miss the mayor's charm, and then what will you do?

Now it's possible that this passage has something of plot importance, in which case, okay, keep it, but trim it, or at least make it interesting enough that we don't skim. For example, let's say the mayor questions the waitress closely about whether there are walnuts on the salad, and makes her go back to the kitchen to make sure. And he says in an aside to the reporter, "I'm deathly allergic to tree-nuts." Well, if he's going to end up dead by walnut, then that passage isn't irrelevant. (I must warn you, most readers are going to read that and say, "Aha! He's going to eat a walnut later and die!" Most readers are too savvy.)

One Psychological Device:

Imagine that you have to cut two pages out of every scene—and don't come crying to me. Theresa once had to cut 20,000 words out of a book of mine. (Okay, so I couldn't do it myself! But she was very gentle, and the book was MUCH better without all those amusing but purposeless digressions.) What would the reader skim? Start there. What doesn't add to the plot? Actually, it helps almost every book to give yourself the assignment: "Cut two words out of every paragraph. Cut three lines out of every page. Cut two pages out of every scene." If you can't figure out a way to cut out two words without destroying the paragraph, maybe you're already writing nice and tight… or maybe you should ask a friend to do it. Worked for me.

Anyway, if you force yourself to consider what is extraneous, you very likely will find the extraneous stuff. Let me give you an analogy. I'm out of town on a business trip, and I knew I'd be driving. So I knew that I had lots of room, and I packed accordingly. I put in 5 pair of shoes, because who knows, maybe I'll need rain boots, right? But last month, I was contemplating dragging two suitcases all over London, and what do you know, I managed to get everything into one suitcase. Why? Because I had to. See what you can leave out if you have to.

(I actually have a separate file called "cuts.wpd" for each project, and when I cut something, I put it in that file, so it's not really gone forever, and I know I can restore it if I have to... yes, it helps. I can be ruthless when I'm not sure it's permanent. :)

(Later... the painful suggestion that many will hate me for, and what the heck, many already do hate me for just that....)

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
Elmore Leonard



Alicia

Closing the February Poll

In February, we asked you how many drafts you do of a typical manuscript. We gave you four choices for responses. The rationale behind these choices may be obvious, but I'd like to talk about them a bit anyway.


Choice 1: One draft. My words are perfect pearls the first time through.

I'm proud that none of you chose this. Not one! This says our readers are smart enough to recognize that writing a novel includes two phases: drafting and revising. Drafting might be more fun -- that's where we get to turn our creative engines free to race all over our subconscious minds, and I think that's true regardless of the method used for generating a story.

But revising is where we take these explorations and chart a neat course that draws them all together. We can try to do some of this work in advance by pre-plotting, and filling out character questionnaires, and snowflaking, and brainstorming with our critique groups, and so on. These are all methods for mapping out a first draft that might need less revision, but not everyone will benefit by these methods. Some folks really just do better when they write the entire first draft straight out of the ether.

And that's fine. Especially, it's fine because none of us are laboring under the idea that this straight-from-the-ether spillage is anything an audience would want to read.


Choice 2: Two drafts. One for clean, and one for shine.

Eight percent of you chose this response. I suspect that this eight percent represents the most disciplined among you. These are the writers who are methodical and cautious, who think through their plots before setting pen to paper, who stare for hours at grids made of note cards on their living room floors.

These are the plotters who block their scenes step by step, the dreamers who spend months or years chewing on a single idea before it's "ready" to write, and the analysts who make complex maps of books they read for pleasure.

By the time two-draft-writers commit the first draft to paper, the entire book exists complete in their heads. There are no surprises. Whatever methods they use, they work toward one goal: thinking through the manuscript before writing it. Because so much work is done before the first draft is written, they rarely need to do major revisions in a second draft. All they're doing, really, is tweaking it.

One draft for clean -- the scenes laid out in neat, causally-connected sequences, with careful blocking and no breaches in logic. And one draft for shine -- spiffing up the word choices, cleaning up the grammar and typos, and highlighting the tension on the pages.

They make it look easy, don't they?


Choice 3: Between three and five drafts. I make multiple passes which focus on particular aspects of the manuscript.

It's no surprise that most of you, around 64%, chose this method. I think it's common to have to feel the way through the plot in some way before you can really get into the meat of organizing it. You have sort of a rough idea of where things will go, but then subplots appear out of nowhere, and you are confronted with bizarre urges to kill off a character, and you start noticing that bumblebees are making an appearance in every chapter. What's with the bumblebees, you wonder, and go trailing after them to find out.

In the end, the first draft will be a semi-coherent outpouring with a few false turns. It will require some rethinking and some clean-up, and it may be that the easiest method for doing that is to make targeted passes at the draft. First you edit for logic and sequencing, then for character, then for theme. Or whatever method works for you -- the beauty of this approach is its flexibility. The writer remains open, creatively, and so there's a native fluidity and freshness that is never lost, regardless of the precise configuration of drafts.


Choice 4: Six or more drafts. I can't seem to stop revising.

Art is messy, they say, but I think it's messiest at the beginning of a learning curve. The nature of creative learning embodies a lot of trial and error. You can't just study an artistic process and learn how to create. You have to create, and use your studies to influence and refine the act of creation.

But it all begins with practicing the creative act. Want to learn how to write? Put your pen to paper. It may be a disaster at first. It may not make sense to anyone but you. You may show it to people and get gentle, careful responses that lead you to beg, "But did you like it?" Because you were filled with passion for this creative product, your goal is to infuse that passion into the audience, and you become determined to "fix" this first effort so that it "works."

As you learn and practice, you revise and revise this early product. And then you revise it some more. You can't let go of these characters or this plot because, by now, you have too much invested in them. You wrote the story initially because of love and passion for the ideas, and dammit, you're going to make it something that others will love passionately.

Maybe you'll succeed at this. But maybe you won't. And that's okay. If this manuscript spends its entire life in a box under your bed, never to be published, it is still a worthy project because you honed your skills on its contents. It may never have an audience, but that's okay. Let it be what it is. Honor it. Just as painters make pencil sketches which are never intended to be finished products, so too can writers make drafts that are just "writing around" rather than "writing."

It's okay to try new techniques and ideas. It's okay to play around and even to make a complete hash of things. What's not okay is failing to recognize the difference between a creative trial and a finished product. Not everything is fit for publication, but that doesn't mean it's a failure.

Of course, there's a second type of infinite reviser. Some folks are simply afraid to show their work, and cling to the revision process so that they never have to put their work out there into the great wide world. Whether they say they fear failure or success, it's pretty certain that they just don't want to open their work up to outside opinions.

Publishing is a tough game. I can think of plenty of reasons a sane creature would avoid the publishing process. So come to think of it, it may not be fear that motivates a person to revise and revise as a way of avoiding submitting. This might be a sign of wisdom!

Writing and publishing aren't the same thing -- the infinite reviser loves to write, but resists publishing. I suppose that's fine, as long as you're clear on your goals. If you want to publish, you have to submit, and that means that at some point you must stop revising. Soothe yourself by promising never to look at reviews. Hire an agent who will screen out as much commentary as possible. Become a hermit and refuse to do book tours or interviews. Do whatever you must to make it easier to let go of the manuscript.



So what do you think? Did I get it right? Did I interpret the results in a way that makes sense to you?

I thought this was a fun little poll. We've got a new poll up for March. If you're reading this on a feed reader, you'll have to visit the site to vote in the polls.

Avoiding info dump

Alicia says--

There's an art to introducing information into the narrative without being too obvious.

Let me give you a bad example first. In this kind of case, the "info dump" always feels like an intrusion. It's usually a break in POV, and sounds clumsy besides, drawing attention to the impartation of information as if it's coming from outside the story-- reminding the reader that this is a story, that is, Not True. So here is ... bad example, which is actually based on something I read recently:

Sandy was their sister-in-law, as she was married to Tom's brother. She had been educated at Harvard and knew the silver market better than anyone in Providence, the largest city in the state, where she had lived since taking a job with Beckett-Turner, the largest fund manager in Rhode Island.

This sort of "info dump" breaks the continuity of the narrative and takes the viewpoint away from the characters and gives it to... I don't know. Some outsider, the author maybe. But let's say we need to know some of this information. After all, if all we have is, "Sandy walked in, and Tom said, "There you are," well, the reader is going to wonder who Sandy is-- more important, the reader will wonder, "Did I miss something? Was Sandy identified earlier?"

So how to impart this info subtly, without taking the emphasis away from the action and the characters?

First, I'd suggest deciding which of those factoids are necessary. Yes, that she's married to their brother (but if you have that, her being their sister-in-law is redundant). No, that Providence is the largest city in the state. (That is, don't bother to insert little bits that declare, "I did some research!" but have no other relevance to this story.) When you revise, decide what the reader actually needs to know, and note those down.

Then try writing the action of the scene, the dialogue, the introspection, without putting in any of the info bits. That way you'll get the important scene stuff in, and on this, you can hang the info on framework you've established.

Now about the info-hanging. No matter how essential that information is, keep in mind that it is LESS important than the action of the scene. So the way to introduce information subtly is to imbed it in existing sentences. The main clause of the sentence should usually carry the main action in the sentence, whether that is actual action, or dialogue, or character emotion or thought. Other elements-- intro phrases, dependent clauses, relative clauses-- are good places to imbed information, as they are, by definition, subordinate, and the reader will read them that way.

For example:

Tom shoved the secret file under his blotter as his sister-in-law Sandy strode into the office.

The reader will register who Sandy is, but know what is most important is that "secret file" revelation.

Now I'm sure you're thinking, "That's not deep POV! Tom knows who Sandy is! So he wouldn't think about her as his sister-in-law!"

Well, POV doesn't have to be deep all the time, or any of the time. Most books are NOT in deep POV, partly because it's more difficult to convey such information when you're confined to the deep perspective of the POV character. In a slightly more distant third-person POV, the reader will have no trouble accepting little bits of explanation like "his sister-in-law". That's just conventional narration, and as long as you keep it short and unobtrusive, the reader will absorb the info and move on.

However, in deep POV, you might need to imbed the information more deeply. So how would you do it? Let's try it:


Tom shoved the secret file under his blotter as Sandy strode into the office. Wouldn't be safe to let his sister-in-law know about the case.

The omission of the subject in the second sentence gives that "deep POV" feel, and separating the "sister-in-law" from the name might make the information seem more like it might have come from his own thoughts. But, as I said, it's especially hard to imbed information in deep POV, because we don't "think aloud" what we already know.

Another way to imbed is in dialogue, but be careful here. The reader is, like all of us, an expert in conversation-- we've all heard it all our life, after all. So we're quick to identify clunky, unrealistic dialogue. My friend Lynn Kerstan warns against what she calls "As you know, Alfonse," dialogue, where characters lecture each other about what they both know. So you wouldn't want this:
"Sandy!" Tom cried. "As my sister-in-law, you know about the family fortune and the difficulties we've had with our hedge fund the last year."

Clunk. So what would work? Think about what he might actually say. What's his motivation here? What is his goal? What's he trying to reveal? What's he trying to conceal? How can we fit that bit of info into what he'd say anyway? Go back to what you wrote of the scene without the info, and think about how you can modify it to add the info.

For example, maybe Tom wants to cozen Sandy to distract her from that secret file.

"Hey!" Tom got up and crossed the room to hug Sandy, blocking her view of his desk and the secret file. He let her go and said heartily, "So how's my favorite sister-in-law?"

The "heartily" is a sign that he's trying, that he's not being completely upfront here. And precisely because of that, the reader might accept a bit of clumsiness, because most of us are a bit clumsy when we're trying to deceive or conceal. It'll sound authentic-- authentically inauthentic. :)

Okay, so what other techniques have you all found to sneak in necessary but obtrusive information?

Alicia