Drill, Baby, Drill

...or, How is Rewriting Like Having a Dental Crown Replaced?

But first, a word from our sponsor:

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Now back to our regularly scheduled blog.

A few weeks ago, I was noshing scrambled eggs when one of my dental crowns popped out. This particular crown had always been a troublemaker. I suspect it wasn't done well in the first place. The dentist who checked it (different from the fellow who put it in) pretty much confirmed that when he said the crown didn't have a good hold on the tooth and he had to drill.

Not a word any dental patient likes to hear.

The last couple weeks, as I've been walking around with a temporary plastic crown in my mouth, I've been doing rewrites. I've realized that fixing the rough spots in a manuscript is a bit like doing dental work. You have to drill a little deeper to make each change take hold and cause no further trouble.

For instance, one proofreader had crossed out the word "or" and inserted the word "of." The sentence was something like this:

I spent my afternoons in the parking lot or the store.

You can see where "of" might make sense, yet "or" was correct. I could have simply left it alone. In fact, when I've edited short stories, about 80% of writers would leave it alone. However, my feeling is, if the sentence stopped one reader's eye, it might be distracting to others, too. This problem was easily remedied by the insertion of the word "either" between "afternoons" and "in."

A more complex example involved a reader who became confused about a character, and had to go back to read earlier pages to see if she'd miss something. Never, ever, should your readers need to backtrack. 90% percent of this problem was solved by simply adding the character's maiden name to her married name with a hyphen. It made her relationship to other family members more obvious. But I had to ask myself, what made the reader miss the first mention of this character? In rereading those pages, I realized that this character actually said and did nothing the rest of the scene. She'd become wallpaper. So I rewrote those pages. Then I came across a paragraph later in the story where the name change caused another potential misunderstanding. In other words, I couldn't do a simple find-and-replace. I had to make sure that the change became seamless.

For novice writers, when proofreaders and editors send comments back to you, don't get defensive, and don't waste time explaining to that one reader why you wrote a passage a certain way. The reader is always right, though they sometimes can't tell you exactly what stopped their eye as they were reading. The fact is, though, that their eye did stop, so rewriting needs to be done. Don't ignore their comments, or slap down a quick  band-aid. Drill a little deeper. Marry the fixed segment to the rest of the story.

Peace,
Elena

Weeding

THIS week I attacked the weeds in my flower garden.  The word "weed" conjures in most American minds the image of dandelions (or marijuana, depending on your perspective).  Like Miss Maggie in my novels, I don't mind dandelions, or the white blossoms of clover, or purple of ground ivy in my lawn.  Adds interest to the relentless green of grass (much of my grass is off the crab variety, but it is green).

The worst of my weed archenemies are

-- morning glories - sure, they look pretty, but they cover the shrubs like kudzu, until every leaf below their canopies withers and dies for lack of sunlight,

-- deadly nightshade - while an appropriate vine for a mystery writer's garden, like the morning glories, it gets out of hand quickly.  I'd also rather not tempt the neighborhood kids to taste the pretty red berries,

-- ragweed - the most vile and evil of my weeds.  It lurks below ground, waiting until your back is turned, then sends up shoots that hide beneath, well, morning glories.  Their pollen makes me miserable from August through late November each year, so even if I let the morning glories and nightshade grow, the ragweed must
be evicted, the sooner, the better.

This past week I also worked on rewriting an old manuscript.  Weeding and rewriting are similar processes--the pulling out of the bad, ugly, and harmful to keep the flowers alive.  Yet many of my writing students have no patience with rewriting.  They think they're done right after planting.

What weeds can be found in a manuscript?  The first choice of many people would be "adverbs."  I liken adverbs to dandelions.  Sure, they can be annoying, they can be rampant, but they aren't going to kill a piece of writing unless you let them take over.  A reasonable amount of adverbs can even lend interest to your prose.

Poorly drawn characters are the morning glories of a story--characters who are, at best, unlikeable, and at worst, uninteresting.  A reader who doesn't care what happens to the protagonist will put the book down.  Bad characters can overshadow and kill an otherwise great work of fiction.

The ragweed of writing, in my opinion, is boring prose.  Very rarely will you find one small, lackluster patch of narration in a book.  Drab prose, allowed to take root, will often infest every page.  Lots of writers will banish snooze-inducing paragraphs from their first chapters, yet don't weed as meticulously as the book continues.

I can't simply sell my house and leave every time the ragweed in my garden give me fits of sneezing.  Readers (and editors) will walk away from a manuscript infested with weeds.  Rewriting is necessary not only to the aesthetic beauty of the final product, but to its health and longevity as well.

Peace,
Elena