In Cold Blood
May 30th, 2010
bring on the adverbs
I am painstakingly working my way through 90,000 words examining their arrangement on the page to see if I can achieve greater fluency, clearer descriptions, less cluttered dialogue and an elegant solution to every tiny problem I encounter.
That is my goal. I won’t achieve it. There’ll be clangers and clumsiness, excess and irrelevance and even a fair old swag of self-indulgence. But I’m slaughtering my darlings as cold bloodedly as I can. Having rewritten most of the book I’ve waded through a veritable Thermopylae of blood, and I’ll keep up the slaughter as long as I have to.
The perfect text will always hover out of my reach, but at least I’m trying.
I’m always astonished at how some writers don’t do this. I’m thinking of a piece I read recently, posted in the public domain, by an unpublished writer as an example of his writing skills – not an informal communication, or even a blog post. Numerous spelling mistakes, punctuation mistakes and clumsy expression pointed to little time spent polishing, cutting, polishing and cutting again and again.
The competition for readers is intense; the competition for publishers is three times as intense. I know typos slip through, apostrophes can be wild and faithless creatures and trained proof readers can miss errors. But if every line is plagued with such mistakes it signifies either a sloppy, unprofessional approach or an eagerness to get the piece out before it’s ready. Either way, it’s not good.
Related posts
Categories: on writing | Tags: editing, reading, writing | 3 Comments
for a good feed ...
