Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:


"To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over."

—John Hersey




( Illustrated version. )

Holy Macaroni—I hit a fervent patch of histrionic saidisms in my manuscript today. It's the big climax thing happening here and lots of emotional baggage coming to the fore—but I mean, really. I had to work those out of my book's system right quick.

You know, I have no ambition to write anything more ambitious than melodrama, but I want it to be the Great American Melodrama, I want it to be good melodrama. So when I hit a patch like this, or those abominable shortcuts last week, I'm grateful that writers get a chance to do it over again.

I want to make the sentences clean and bright, and each cut feels like a victory to me, accomplishing two things at once: making the writing better and bringing the word count down. If both factors aren't present, I don't make the cut (and in fact I've added where clarification was still needed), but when you've got something this big, there's always room for some cutting.

I have a "no strays" rule that I apply to each paragraph: I leave no single word (or even two or three small ones) left by themselves on a line at the end of a paragraph. Nothing below, say, an inch to three-quarters of an inch (the Angry Inch). I can usually find something in each paragraph to bring that stray back up into the fold and have one less line in my story. And the way I look at it, if it's that easy to bring the stray up, there's probably more cut potential left in the manuscript. If I struggle and struggle before I can find a cut that doesn't damage the sentences or the sense—or give up in frustration—then perhaps I'm arriving at the proper word count.

She thundered. :-)