Writing and Revising . . . or When Is a Do-Over Overdone?

Every writer must revise. It's an icky fact of life. It's where perspiration meets inspiration. It's what separates the tough guys from the talkers and posers. I'm a tough guy when I fearlessly excise redundancies from my prose. Not always a breeze. But as one of my friends' dads used to say, "Nothing hard is ever easy." This is especially true of writing. Writing is hard. Revision is hard. An exquisite piece of writing, like a wooden sailboat, not only means the ability to sail clear and true to an intended destination, it's also a testament to the love of the craft.

Good writing isn't accomplished in a single Saturday. It requires patience and forbearance, those bastions of character that are becoming rare as a pink pigeon these days. It means working doggedly to perfect a passage until you wish someone else had written it, so it would be their problem to solve! And it means letting go of the cute and clever, in service of the fluent and clear. Writing well means knowing how much is too much.


"Exaggerate nothing."

-- Michael Larsen, How to Write a Book Proposal


The Wisdom of Wishing for Wigwams . . .
and Other Perils Perpetrated at the Tip of a Pen
How fair and wondrous our words appear, when first they do pour out upon the page! Only two weeks later, however, the purple passages are evident as a roundly hammered thumb. Just the other day a writer friend was reading a first draft of mine (True friends share cold drafts, both the written kind and the fireside kind." And this draft was barely chilled; the ink still shone in the light, so eager was I that it be Seen. Perusing, my friend scratched his chin. "I just want to know one thing," he began. "When you described this character as a 'fickle fanatic,' did you really mean it?" Well no, I was just being clever, I admitted, pulling out my red pento mark the errant phrase.

A little later my friend paused again. "And did you really intend to say that tears 'pooled in her eyes like daunting dreams? How can dreams be daunting? And do they 'pool,' exactly? Pools are usually pretty big, too, you know. At least in Texas." I sighed. Such is the life of a writer, and of a writer's friend. One is always asking and answering such questions. Truth and fiction once again were clashing in the tireless interplay that makes writers wonder how a sentence -- any sentence at all -- manages to succeed in making literary sense.

When is a word or phrase overdone? When (after lying dormant for two weeks) it no longer sounds true and real. When it begs the question. When it sits like a limp in the middle of the sentence and says so little that if you removed it no one would notice. I took out the abovementioned passages, those my friend objected to, as well as one particularly juicy one in which I described a high school teacher as having "parted the seas of my young mind." It was, in fact, too much. I could see that. Even with a part running down the middle of my mind.

Try this right now.
My first creative writing teacher used to say, when she saw each new poem I handed over, "Ooohh, I love this. This is great." Or sometimes, "Aww. This is so sensitive and beautiful." Praise has its place, and I appreciate her to this day for saying nice things about my early efforts which were, at best innocently immature and at worst, exceedingly self-indulgent. But try this: Put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) for, say, two minutes, without stopping, and especially without hoping someone else will love it later. Have fun! Let those words tumble out and then . . .
Turn it into a portrait of someone. Removing all adjectives, tell a story about this person. Go on, it'll be great. Why pull out all the adjectives? Because they tend to stack up, like dishes in a Sunday sink. If you remove the adjectives before you begin to revise, you won't have to contend with sentences like, "Her arms were narrow, long, and white." If you toss out all adjectives, you'll also be forced to eradicate the verb "to be." And this (she said, breaking her own rule to make a point) is a very good thing. (See how sterile that sounded?) And if you eradicate little old "to be," exciting wonderments begin to arise, such as, "She bent near, and the fringe on the cuff of her jacket swept across his arm. A little shiver traveled with singular purpose all the way up to his earlobe." Okay, so I let a "little" adjective sneak in there. But you get the idea. Have fun now.

But when you return to this bit of writing later, with your red pen? Remember: enough is enough.


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Ceci Miller is an author, book editor, and owner of CeciBooks editorial and book publishing consultancy for authors and indie publishers. See books here.