In tonight’s episode, a sad story about a book, plus some writing advice.
I won’t name the book or the author. At the start he showed some promise as a writer of Christian fantasy. His prose wasn’t professional, but it interested me. He made a good first impression. I was rooting for him, in spite of his often-clumsy style.
But he lost me when he started using demons as point of view characters. That’s a dangerous experiment, and not advised for newbies. I don’t think I’d try it myself. We’re talking about a whole different level of intelligence here; it doesn’t work (in my view) to portray suprenatural beings thinking like human villains, even very smart ones.
“But what” (you may ask) “about The Screwtape Letters?” The Screwtape Letters (in my opinion) is spiritual satire, not intended as the kind of fiction where the reader suspends disbelief. The Screwtape Letters is more about exploring ideas than characters.
But setting aside the issue of demons, I asked myself, “What writing advice would I give this author, if he were to ask me for guidance” (based on my own tremendous success, of course)?
Here’s the exercise I’d set him – based on an exercise in a correspondence course I took once, back in ancient times when people took correspondence courses.
The Exercise (note that this is not intended to make the piece of work you’ll tackle suitable for publication. It’s just intended to give your writing muscles a workout):
Take a piece of your own writing. Preferably at least a page long.
Check the word count.
Now, cut it to 50% of that.
Cut unnecessary verbiage. Cut adjectives and adverbs, replacing them with more vivid nouns and verbs. Find precise individual words to replace longer phrases. Interrogate each sentence and phrase to make it justify its existence. If it’s just decorative, excise it.
What you get in the end may not be anything like publishable prose. Or anything like the writing you want to produce. But it will teach you how to trim. You’ll be surprised what you can accomplish along those lines.
The final, mature style you adopt for yourself may be nothing so Hemingway-esque. But the exercise will do you good, like a workout in a gym.
Yes… I remember a writing teacher in college telling me a story I’d written suffocated him in verbiage.
Yet I wouldn’t want everyone to write lean, e.g. Dickens. (I remember also that about the first time I read one of his novels, Oliver Twist, I expected it would be verbose, and I thought I’d mark paragraphs that could/should be cut. It seems it came to about one paragraph.
It needs to be a good judge who can make the call about what needs to be cut, if anything, after an author has reviewed his writing once or twice. Leanness in itself is not necessarily a good thing.
Scattered thoughts:
I thought precis-writing along these lines a good exercise when teaching Freshman Comp.
I remember reading that Kipling would go to work in something like this way – setting a short-story draft aside for awhile and then going back to see what he could profitably cut.
I love Stoppard’s The Dogg’s Troupe 15-Minute Hamlet.