Pruning and Editing

Yesterday, Sunday, was a good day for many reasons. I took a walk at 6:30 a.m. and had most of the area to myself. I read the Sunday paper, wrote 2500 words, made a delicious dinner with my husband, and together we weeded and pruned the neglected areas of the yard for two hours. I woke up this morning thinking about pruning. This is what I'm going to have to do with my current WIP when I have a complete first draft.

The azalea in the back garden has grown tall and thin, very unlike an azalea. Its yellow and white flowers were lovely this spring, but when we went out to look at it in the afternoon, we found no buds

Mock cherry & more

had set for next year. We also found a mock cherry had nearly strangled it--and done this in one or two months. We set about pruning the cherry, but even though we've cut it all down and now we can clearly see how tall and stringy our shrub is, we also can see that the roots of the cherry are intertwined with the azalea, and extracting them with be a challenge. I think we can do this without hurting the azalea, but it will require skill and care.

That mock cherry made me think of a character I introduced in the beginning of my WIP. She's threaded through the story, but as I now see the plot and the arc of the protagonist's story, I know that character has to be excised. I just hope I can do it without losing some good scenes that illustrate the protagonist's character, flaws and all.

Another challenge in the garden is the incredibly aggressive forsythia and its less likable companion oriental bittersweet, with its orange and yellow berries in the fall. This vine may

Bittersweet, Leslie J. Mehrhoff,
Universith of Connecticut, Bugwood.org

turn into a bright and cheerful Halloween and Thanksgiving decoration, but for the rest of the year it's a nightmare. We pulled and snipped and piled it up, and there was plenty more waiting for us deeper in the shrubbery. This one I liken to a theme that once introduced pops up everywhere, even though it's a cliche, even tacky, and its removal would make the story much more interesting and original. But cliches are everywhere, and a writer must be diligent to get rid of them.

Another problem is blackberry canes. I love berries--blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, cherry, and blackberry. We've grown all of them in our yard at one time or another, and some are easier to deal with than others. The easiest are strawberries, providing I can keep the animals and birds away, and the hardest are cherries. Raspberries and blackberries grow themselves, like an invasive species, which some are. We found the blackberries sprouting up along the driveway, under a side porch, and in the rhododendron planting. The berries are delicious, and growing them takes no effort. But getting rid of the canes does. And I know that even though I cut them back, to the root, the vine will spread underground and pop up elsewhere.

Sometimes the berries make me think of a few stock characters I seem to have created for my own

mystery series. The three sisters or brothers, the quiet villager who knows enough to steer the protagonist in the right direction and then disappears, the slightly batty older relative and the shrewd one, are just some of them. These are typical of the figures all writers have used at one time or another. They're attractive, easy to work with, pop up whenever needed without much effort on my part, and add a certain sweetness to the story. But they also make the story too easy to write, offering a veneer of beauty and charm when as a writer I know I need to go deeper. I need to root them out just like blackberry canes.

I could go on, but you get the idea. New England, like the rest of the country, is being overrun by invasive species. If I could get rid of them all, I would, though I would miss the azaleas and rhodies and pears and the begonias, especially the pears and the begonias. But I can root out their cousins in my fiction. So, that's my job for the rest of the summer, rooting out characters and themes and clues that don't belong, and that only keep me from creating something better.