Tag: literary voice

When Editing Goes Too Far

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measuring tape

Photo by Ciara McDonnell

I preach plenty about trimming the fat from writing. Strunk, White and Zinsser command it, and I’ve learned it firsthand from dealing with limited space in ads, radio commercials and billboards.

Efficient writing is better writing.

But this isn’t some professional writing secret. You’ll read it on all the forums, hear it at all the conferences and even in your local writers’ group. Cut, cut, cut. Maybe it’s the growing popularity of flash fiction, maybe it’s the waning attention spans of the masses, but whatever the cause, the fact remains:

Skinny writing is in.

We’re all shaking our pages till the adverbs fall out, beating the paragraphs till the parentheticals flee, ever striving for that low, low word count.

The red ink flows in our lust for trim prose.

And what are we seeing as a result? Leaner literature?

Or malnourished manuscripts?

Are we perpetuating a healthy word diet – or an editing disorder?

There is a point when the art becomes emaciated, with wording so simple you can’t differentiate the work of one author from another. Cut too deep, and the voice will bleed right out of your sentences.

Cutting words is one of those rules you have to learn first, to break later.

First you learn how to make each word count. How to construct clear thoughts. How not to waste your readers’ time.

But then you have to find your voice: that special way of writing you have (or your narrator has) that no one else has. And that voice may require a few “unnecessary” words.

Once you know the mechanics of writing efficiently, you can start learning the art of writing uniquely.

What happens if you don’t?

I took the red pen to the three wordiest excerpts from the 5 fantastic examples of voice I posted two years ago. Here’s how they came out.

Mr. Dickens: A Christmas Carol

There is no doubt Marley was dead. The clergyman, clerk, undertaker, and chief mourner all signed the register of his burial. Scrooge Signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

I don’t know what is particularly dead about a doornail; I might regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery. But our ancestors’ wisdom is in the simile; and I won’t disturb it, or the Country’s ruined.

WORDS CUT: 60

Mr. Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small yellow sun.

Orbiting this at about ninety-eight million miles is an insignificant blue-green planet whose primitive ape-descended life forms still think digital watches are cool.

This planet had a problem: most of its people were unhappy. Most of the suggested solutions for this problem involved the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

WORDS CUT: 48

Mr. Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

You don’t know about me, unless you read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that doesn’t matter. Mr. Mark Twain made that book, and told the truth, mainly. He stretched some things, but everybody lies sometimes, except Tom’s Aunty Polly, Mary, and the Widow Douglas.

WORDS CUT: 55

Feel that? That something missing? How it seems rushed?

I could have cut even more: Dickens’s entire second paragraph; several of the adjectives from Adams’s piece. But honestly, would there be anything left?

Learn to write efficiently, by all means. But don’t cut so much that you lose yourself.

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Need help finding your voice? Sign up for Voice Week, November 4 – 8! You’ll have a chance to win a copy of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief!

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measuring tape

Are you over-editing?

How to be Original

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Photo by WoodleyWonderWorks

Photo by WoodleyWonderWorks

You’ve been working on your novel for several years when you discover the latest uber popular YA book is exactly like yours. And you curse the author’s earlier timing because if you ever manage to publish yours, everyone will say you copied hers.

Then you think about it and realize your book is a mix between Out of the Silent Planet, Lord of the Flies, Ender’s Game, and The Elfin Ship. It’s the mess of words you’d discover on your carpet if your home library threw up.

Crap.

So you throw the idea out the window and sit down to your notebook, determined to come up with something truly new. But after a few hours, all you can think of is a bunch of ideas that have been done several times. For instance:

  • The chosen one
  • Anyone with super powers
  • Villain turns out to be hero’s father
  • Genius child is amazing at everything
  • Eccentric genius solves mysteries
  • Orphans
  • Forbidden love
  • People who see the unseen
  • Art and literature are outlawed
  • Everyday life is a lie
  • Last man on earth

And this is just a small sampling of the ideas that have passed from fresh to done to copied to trendy to cliché. The more you see of the world, art and literature, the more you’ll realize it is all the Same Old Thing. King Solomon said it best: ain’t nothing new under the sun.

He might’ve worded it differently.

Anyway, the point remains. There are no new story ideas. But that’s not such a bad thing. Some story arcs are timeless, so long as they’re driven by strong, interesting characters. Because, while of course we should take the plot road less traveled whenever possible, plot is not the key to being original.

Take it from my favorite writer:

No man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

– C.S. Lewis

Tell the truth. Tell what you know. Whether you’re actually writing your memoirs or a Martian adventure story, deep down you’re still writing from your own experience. So find the words to most clearly and vividly state what it feels like to be you.

Succeed (it isn’t easy) and one of two things will happen: Either readers will say, with astonished wide eyes, that they never looked at it that way before. Or readers will say, breathless with excitement and tight-throated with tears, that they’d thought until this moment they were the only one who felt that way.

Either way, you have accomplished something incredible.

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Drunk with Dandelion Wine and in Charge of a Bicycle: a Tribute to Ray Bradbury

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photo by Sam Howzit

 He arrived with a seedy two-bit carnival, The Dill Brothers Combined Shows, during Labor Day weekend of 1932, when I was twelve. Every night for three nights, Mr. Electrico sat in his electric chair, being fired with ten billion volts of pure sizzling power. Reaching out into the audience, his eyes flaming, his white hair standing on end, sparks leaping between his smiling teeth, he brushed an Excalibur sword over the heads of the children, knighting them with fire. When he came to me, he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose. The lightning jumped into me. Mr. Electrico cried: “Live forever!”

I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard.*

Tuesday of last week, Mr. Bradbury died.

I sat thinking for awhile about what I would say about him. What was special about his work? Certainly, he had a dark and fantastic imagination. He had an amazing sense of place and a unique way with words. He’s one of the few writers I would read for his voice alone, story aside.

But none of these things do him justice. They are all symptoms of a deeper thing that I feel strongly but that I’m not sure I can put into words.

Remember how everything felt when you were a kid? How much more terrifying and wonderful everything was? Before you got so busy. And jaded. Before you let yourself become ashamed of loving comic books and Saturday morning cartoons and Nancy Drew. Remember how palpably exciting it was to merely pretend to be the captain of a ship? The magic of anticipating Christmas morning that was not only because of the presents? The hot, perfect freedom of summer, and how eternal those three months felt?

We felt things then we can’t seem to feel anymore. We get inklings occasionally, like catching the faintest whiff of a familiar scent, but it seems we’ve forgotten how to really feel them.

Bradbury brings it all back.

 He writes in the passion of feeling we had when we were children. I don’t mean “passion” and “feeling” like drama. I mean magic. Wonder. His words are dripping with it. We drink them and become intoxicated with it.

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip, for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.***

Ray Bradbury never forgot the boy in him. When he wrote, he didn’t have to twist his brain around to squeeze out words like so many of us do. He opened a fire hydrant of his own childhood wonder, and magic came gushing out.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.**

Bradbury’s stories are time machines. Except they don’t take us back to a particular place or era. They take us back to ourselves.

When it is a long damp November in my soul, and I think too much and perceive too little, I know it is high time to get back to that boy with the tennis shoes, the high fevers, the multitudinous joys, and the terrible nightmares. I’m not sure where he leaves off and I start.*

The boy mentioned at the top of this post was Ray Bradbury 80 years ago.

And it will be Ray Bradbury forever.

“Now it’s your turn,” he prods us toward our own landmines:

“Jump!”**

 

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* Zen in the Art of Writing: Drunk and in Charge of a Bicycle

** Zen in the Art of Writing: How to Climb the Tree of Life, Throw Rocks at Yourself, and Get Down Again Without Breaking Your Bones or Your Spirit, A Preface with a Title Not Much Longer than the Book

*** Dandelion Wine

Voice Week: why it totally rocked

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You guys are awesome.

I don’t think I’ve ever read such a wide variety of such high quality work that fascinated and thrilled me as much as the work the Voice Writers did last week. We heard the voices of animals, trees, supernatural beings, a park bench, and dozens of unique humans. We watched a bride prepare for her wedding, and a man on death row prepare for his execution. We questioned and pondered and loved and hated—and learned.

Here’s a few of the cool things that came out of it / that I learned:

Everyone interpreted the project a little differently. The variety of ways people’s pieces fit together made the project fascinating—some used different viewpoints to progressively tell more of the same story or more about the same character, some showed how different personalities would react to the same situation, some were linked only by prompt or by setting and showed the subtle contrasts between personalities. It made me glad I wasn’t too specific about what I thought I wanted for this project–it allowed the participants to be much more brilliant than narrower parameters would have allowed–creative minds need structure, yes, but they also need the freedom to be unique; that’s the same reason Inspiration Monday works as well as it does. (InMon is returning one week from today, by the way!)

He said, she said. Many pieces throughout the week had us guessing whether the narrator was male or female. We inferred gender by deciphering situation and analyzing word choice, and simply by how the character struck us. Sometimes we were right, sometimes wrong. A bit of a debate started over my first piece; in the comments, “female” currently leads the vote eight to three—and the majority is correct! With that in mind, here are some things to consider:

  1. Keeping the main character’s gender vague can be interesting, even profitable in a short story where gender doesn’t matter; readers of either gender can easily place themselves in the head of the narrator.
  2. Keeping the gender of a main character vague for too long, however—such as several paragraphs into a full-length novel—can also throw a reader off if they guessed wrong to begin with.

We can use bias to fight bias. I found myself relating to characters I normally wouldn’t like. I found myself disliking characters I’d normally relate to. I was irritated by the responsible bookstore manager, but I loved the nonchalant killer. I formed opinions, read others’ comments, read the rest of the week’s pieces—and second-guessed myself. I stopped to think about why I felt certain things toward certain characters—and whether that was justified by truth or clouded by bias. A well-crafted voice in a well-crafted story can show your reader the humanity in his enemy—the vulnerability and even the likability.

The mystery of the other side of the story. Possibly the most fun was the switching of views within the same story, a method several of the Voice Writers used to create suspense. In each character, we got a limited perspective—each one saw things the others didn’t; each one told us something new about the story. We got to piece together the clues to reveal a bigger truth than any one character could see.

Actions speak louder than words. One of the finer points of “Show Don’t Tell” hit home for me last week, too. When all was said and done, one of the most powerful illustrations of character was not the words they chose but the actions they used to respond to others. Giving a hot drink to a homeless man, or ignoring him. Locking a door and drowning out what’s on the other side, or taking a deep breath and opening it.

The Internet is the greatest invention since before sliced bread! Twenty years ago we couldn’t do this. Most of us, lacking the support of a writing community (not just here at BeKindRewrite, but all over the social media sphere) probably would’ve died out as writers by now. We would’ve given it up as a silly hobby nobody else cared about. And something precious and beautiful and potentially world-changing would have been thrown away. The Internet connects us across continents and oceans and helps us learn, inspire, and grow together.

So I want to thank each and every one of you for making this week so incredible. I may have gotten it started–but it was you guys who made it happen. Again and again I was blown away by your talent. I don’t think most of you realize just how talented you are. Every one of you contributed something unique and worthwhile. Every comment was encouraging, useful, insightful or all three.

I wish I could send you all books in the mail, but two’s the limit for now! The first random number is 12 – which is R.L.W. over at SnippetsAndScraps. I’ve sent you an email to get your mailing address and choice of prize!

What was your favorite part of Voice Week? Shall we do it again next year?

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Voice Week 2011: Friday

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Ah…the end of an incredible week. The project turned out better than I possibly could have expected. I think we’ve all learned a lot, had a lot of fun–and written some amazing stuff.

And as I write this now, there are still a few un-posted pieces to look forward to! Keep reading up on everyone’s fantastic work here. And tune in Monday for a recap of the entire week–plus the drawing (announcement) of our first prize winner!

 

I struggled for a bit with this one, but finally got into it when I decided it should be a first-day-of-school homework assignment.

See what you think:

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What did you do this summer?

This summer I tried one of mommy’s drinks. I wanted to see what it tasted like because she drinks it all the time and I thought it would be o.k. if I had just a taste but she was mad. It tasted bad. Worse than medicine. It burnt my throat and I felt sick. I asked her why she drank that bad stuff. Then she threw it and it hit the wall and almost hit me but I moved. Sometimes it scares me when she gets mad, but it’s o.k. because when she’s done being mad she’s nice and sometimes we go out for Snickers bars.

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From the prompt “alcoholic mother.” Read the other versions: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4

Who does the character feel like to you? How old, what gender? Where did you think the voice was strong or weak? Let me know!

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