So you want to write beautiful, captivating prose. How do you
do that? One of the best ways is to take out your red pencil and start cutting.
Writing that keeps a reader turning the pages, writing that flows beautifully
is above all concise. Here are a few areas I’ve found to trim, and it never
fails that when I do, it makes the writing more powerful.
Cut adjectives and
adverbs. As
Stephen King famously said, “The road to Hell is paved with adverbs.” When you
cut adjectives and adverbs, you’ll be forced to choose stronger nouns and verbs.
Instead of saying running quickly, you’ll say sprinting. Instead of saying small, stone
house, you’ll say cottage. A page without adjectives and adverbs will be a page
of vivid and energetic prose.
Cut repetition. We want
our readers to get what we’re trying to say. So we hint at things like
character or backstory in myriad ways – dialogue, action, inner dialogue, action,
the perceptions of other characters, and so on. This bogs you down. Readers are
generally an intelligent group. You can trust them to get it the first time.
Cut rambling
dialogue. In real life, we may make half a dozen points before we’re
done speaking, but that kind of dialogue isn’t going to sing on the page. If a
character says more than a couple of sentences, take another look and determine
1) whether something essential is being said and 2) if it’s going to hold your
reader’s attention. James Scott Bell reminds us that dialogue is not people
talking. It’s people using words to reach a goal. It’s conflict, no matter how
subtle. Most of the rest is just chaff and will lose your reader.
Cut physical cues. The strongest cues to what a
character is feeling is their action and dialogue. An occasional hammering
heart or trembling hand is okay, but if you’re putting a lot of them in, you might
need to go back and make sure your action and dialogue is strong enough. If it
is, your reader will have no doubt how your character feels, what she’s not
saying and everything else you want him to know.
Cut crying scenes. My agent once told me that you
get one cry per book. Crying is a passive response and it’s a lazy way to show
emotion. If your character is upset, give them some spunk and have them do
something interesting with that emotion. My experience with cutting tears has
been that the revised scene is always more profound, because I’ve been forced
to dig deeper.
Cut telling prose. That is, let the reader figure
some things out on their own. You don’t have to explain why your character is
hiding the letter or that he doesn’t trust his supposed best friend. If you’ve
left enough clues, the reader will get mentally involved as they try to work it
out and they’ll feel more intelligent for having caught on. And you haven’t weighed
down your writing with explanations.
Cut extraneous
scenes. When you’re done with your first draft, go back through and
find any scenes that don’t move the story forward. There will inevitably be one
or two of them. It’s hard to do. You slaved over that scene. You loved it. But
if it’s not essential to the story, it’s tangling your writing up and slowing
it down.
Cutting makes for lighter, flowing prose. But it has another
purpose. Getting rid of something usually ensures that you need to make
whatever is left is strong enough to stand on its own, which leaves you with richer
writing. What have you cut that made your writing stronger?
No comments:
Post a Comment