I just finished the first draft of my thesis manuscript (can I get a woot?), and now I'm staring down the barrel of the revision process. A friend new to writing asked me about the process of crafting a novel, and when I got to the revision portion, I advised her to be okay with deleting anything. In trying to tighten prose, elevate tension, deepen characters, and strengthen plot, everything is up to the wonder that is Ctrl-x, said I to my friend.
"Oh," said she. "So it's like Buddhist non-attachment."
Exactly.
I'm no expert on Buddhism, and what I do know is likely a very feel-good, Westernized, New Age version of it. However, non-attachment is an idea that we can find in many different religions or philosophies, and it's particularly useful to us as writers. Catherine Coulter once gave a talk to my local RWA group, and she also recommended cutting mercilessly. Our words aren't all "pearls," as she called them. Be ready to cut our most precious pearls from the manuscript because, as beautiful as they may seem, they might be completely useless within the context of our stories.
When I told my friend to be prepared to Ctrl-x anything she's written, I referred to the copy-delete function within Microsoft Word. Ctrl-x will copy highlighted text to the clipboard and delete it from the document. The point is not to delete it altogether. Instead, Ctrl-x (delete) it from the manuscript and then Ctrl-v (paste) it into a dump file where you keep your excised pearls.
Your dump file can make the art of non-attachment much easier to master because you're detaching from those pearls on a temporary basis. If you delete a pearl from the manuscript and then realize after more revision that it really was necessary to your story, you can rescue it from your dump file and put it back where it belongs.
Meanwhile, the pearl that turned out not to be so dear after all will have a happy home in your dump file. You might realize later that the dump file is full of dreck, and you can delete it then. Or you might find a pearl that really belongs to another story. And then you might realize that the rescued pearl doesn't belong in that new story, either, so you Ctrl-x it once again.
The point is to give up our attachment to those words in our manuscripts. Detach from them and realize that their presence is not absolutely necessary. However, the ability to give up a word, a clever phrase, a meticulously crafted paragraph, or even an entire chapter is key to the revision process. Nothing is sacred, and attachment to words we wrote weeks or even months ago can hold back a story's potential.
As I ramp myself up for the start of revisions, I'm getting Zen with my bad self. Looking for ways to strengthen, sculpt, and trim my writing. Detaching my ego from pretty words. Delighting myself as the story underneath the dreck rises up and becomes an intricate setting for all my pearls.
7 comments:
I keep a Word file for every book and paste my "pearls" in there. Once in awhile, I'll have an entire scene. I rarely go back and rescue any on the pearls, but I feel better knowing they're still there. Just in case.
KL, nice post. I didn't realize I was in a Zen moment when I heed the advice Never fall in love with your words. They're tools plain and simple. But like Edie, I have a file called Scraps. Just in case I have a delete moment and wish I hadn't ;)
Hi:
Sometimes I think removing pearls from a manuscript is ‘the most unkindest cut of all’. (With all due respect to Brutus.)
Thinking of Zen, there is a saying: “You can’t walk into the same river twice.”
After you delete material from your story, the remaining story is not the same story for you as it is for your reader. Your reader does not know what was cut and how that reader fills in the gaps might actually be better than what you had planned. You never know.
F. Scott Fitzgerald found it almost impossible to cut good material from stories. Hemingway once insisted that he cut a wonderful, musical, line from a novel and while Fitzgerald finally did it, he wrote a short story just so he could use that line. By the way, he sold that story to Esquire for a lot of money. Now, that’s a good idea for your unused pearls.
Irving Stone had a great idea. He just wrote the story he wanted to write and let his wife cut one-half to two-thirds of the manuscript. In fact Stone could not sell his novels until his wife cut them in half.
Lesson: sometimes less is more. But that doesn’t make it any easier.
Thanks, KL, you pointed out one of the hardest lessons a writer has to learn.
Vince
Painful, but necessary, rite of passage, KL!! Creativity is such a thrill, that we think every word poured onto the paper deserves applause.
Not.
I, too, am in the revising stage of my latest mss. You are so right about the cutting process. Using WordPerfect as my program of choice, I'm not sure of the Ctr-x feature, but I do created a Toss file and cut and paste many strands of pearls. Though painful at the time, I find I never go back to the Toss file to retrieve and replace in the manuscript.
Still, it's a safety net. Being the uncertain and uncourageous person that I am, I need to know those precious words are not completely lost.
Thanks for the timely post, KL! Good luck with the revisions!
First, congrats of the first draft of your thesis. Those things ain't easy!
Second, here's an adaptation of your idea. I leave all that stuff in and retrievable from within the document by using track changes in Word. Not sure what it's called in WP. That way I can see the text with or without something that's cut. Save a version with those changes included.
When I'm satisfied, I do an 'accept all', then [here's the important part, so pay attention] save it with a NEW filename. Your originally corrected work is still there and your new modified version doesn't have all those changes in the background, just waiting to sneak out later.
I love revising. It's cleansing, somehow.
WOOT, WOOT to you!
Most of my pearls are the irritant instead of the pearl(my jewelry background is showing) but I do keep a file of deletes for each draft.
It's a hard but most important lesson not to fall in love with your words.
Great post KL, onward with your thesis.
~LA
If I make extensive changes in a story, I copy the entire story into a new document and change away.
I cut some scenes from a second version of a story and on the forth version those scenes fit because of the story and character changes.
I keep all versions!
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