Trimming

This week's challenge? An exercise from Louise Doughty's A Novel in a Year: Choose a scene, do a word count, and cut the words by a quarter. Repeat with next scene. After a few days, read the new and old versions to see which sounds better.

Cutting out whole paragraphs, Doughty says, is cheating. Instead, she says to consider each sentence, each word, and ruthlessly eliminate anything that is not absoutely necessary (case in point, there are a couple of adverbs that last sentence could do without).

At first, I thought this exercise was getting too specific too soon, but I tried it anyway with three scenes of different length (from 1 to 3 pages). Turned out that in the process of doing such mindful trimming, all kinds of other useful things popped up. Things like places or characters that need more description, parts that might be better off somewhere else in the story, questions about how a character feels/reacts in a particular moment, bits that need to be added for clarity, moments that beg for more/less tension. Things that will help me make more substantial revisions when I get around to serious rewriting.

What sounded like a task that was all about the word count turned out to be about something quite different. While my left brain was busy counting words, my right brain snuck in and put its creativity to work, re-seeing the scene. And, after spending ten weeks cranking out new material, it felt good to revisit some scenes that I hadn't looked at for a while.

Truth is, I think I like this part of the writing process better than coming up with new material. Or maybe it is just more in my comfort zone after years spent evaluating my students' creative writing.

Just one more reason to keep exercising the madman daily...