Trimming the Text

One of my flaws as a writer is writing too much. I confess to overwriting, adding in long descriptions because I'm not sure the reader will understand if I'm terse. Sometimes I add a short paragraph to flesh out a setting or a character, how they behaved in an earlier moment to give the reader a sense of this person's identity, quirks, or ways of dealing with others. Unfortunately, I really like some of these paragraphs and they tend to survive repeated revisions. When I reach the trimming stage, I go after them. It isn't always easy, but I know I have to cut them.

 

Most of us have learned to skip, omit, erase adverbs. They slow down the reader, entangle her in an unnecessary stop along the way, and add nothing that isn't better expressed by recasting the sentence and revealing character or behavior through action. Adjectives can be useful, but, again, if they show up too often I rewrite the sentence and remind myself there are better ways of getting the point across.

 

Now that I'm an editor for a new anthology I'm more conscious than ever of overwriting, one of my bad habits and apparently one that a lot of other writers suffer from. This is too bad because some of the stories I read would be good choices for the anthology if the writer had trimmed the text, removing unnecessary words and overlengthy paragraphs.

 

George Saunders recognizes this weakness in himself as well as the rest of us, and addresses it in his book on short fiction, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Saunders includes an exercise in an appendix that asks the writer to cut a six-hundred-word passage down to three hundred words. It sounds easy but it isn't. Of course, anyone can slash three hundred words but the goal isn't just to reduce the number of words but to remove the clutter and let the essence of the piece emerge, stronger and clearer. I think about this whenever I think I've finished a story and have arrived at the final stages of editing. I think I'm looking for typos and missing words, but really I'm looking at all those unnecessary lines, the extras that I couldn't let go of. I reread and trim, I read aloud and trim, I read again looking for more words to trim. 

 

Trimming forces me to find the essence of each line, the core idea and expression. When I do the story moves swiftly and clearly, and the point of each line is made, sharp and quick. The reader doesn't know what has been taken out. She or he only knows how well the story moves, how precise and exact the telling. At least, that's what I hope happens.