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“Every wasted word lowers the energy of a sentence. Every wasted sentence drains the power of its paragraph. A wasted paragraph saps the strength of the whole story. Padding of any sort is a dangerous softness; it makes the reader doze off when they are supposed to be driving.”
- From Ben Nyberg’s “One Great Way to Write Short Stories” (Writer’s Digest Books: 1998):
For myself, this type of dense and meaningful prose will not emerge in the first draft and I must wait for the rewrites. At first this seemed daunting--but now I love it! Rewrites, especially the final few, feel like adding those final touches with the extra-fine sandpaper on a piece of woodworking.
For a while, however, I treated MS Word’s cut tool like a chainsaw. My novella-in-progress (“All the Humans Are Sleeping”) became so dense, it transformed into utter incoherency. It resembled a child’s attempt at cutting his own hair. I later realized that oft time the problematic prose didn't require amputation; but merely trimming and substitution to make it more precise and relevant.
Or sometimes a few gems needed identification and extracted. I recently rewrote the exposition to my short story “Cycle of Darkness”. The new draft proved so appropriate to the plot line that I intended to arbitrarily forget about the original opener. But I took the time to reread it and found that four paragraphs fit well into the end of the new exposition with a little tweaking.
Does anybody else have any tips or stories about giving one’s manuscript a haircut?
In creativity rising,
John
John A. Manley creativityrising@distributel.net
[This message has been edited by Creativity Rising (edited June 29, 2005).]
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I wish I could remember the exact wording of one of my favorite quotes. It says something to the effect that: 'Good writing is like the engine of a car. There should never be any parts in it that don't have a purpose.'
Posts: 2026 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
MS Word cut tool? I just went into Word, but I couldn't find anything about it in Help (which should come as a surprise to no one!). What is it?
Posts: 2830 | Registered: Dec 2004
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I'm assuming "cut" as in "cut and paste". Ctrl-X actually lifts whatever text you've highlighted for selection, and if you don't paste it in anywhere, then it's gone.
Mind you, the "delete" key" has always struck me as the simpler option.
Me, I very rarely delete anything. I move sections down to the bottom of the document, and then eventually save the whole thing into a prior version. Too many times I've deleted sections of a work and then come back to it and thought "hey, wait a minute, I wrote a really cool bit and now it's gone...".
Squirrel mentality, perhaps; but better safe than sorry.
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That may be a squirrel mentality, but it's a better method than the one used by an ex-boss of mine. She saved everything in the "recycle" bin of her computer; just in case she might need it again.
Posts: 2026 | Registered: Mar 2005
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Elan, that metaphor of a properly working car works for me, though I don't know much a bout mechanics.
Chris, I'm lost, why do you not feel dense and meaninful prose would harm novel writing? I realize novels can more forgiving, but...?
Wbriggs, as Tchernabyelo explained I was referring to the cut and paste feature. I'm very anti-mouse and use the shift key to highlight items.
Likewise I don't cut prose out completely, but repaste them for possible future use. I found popping cuts at the end of the document made it a bit tidious jumping back to the exact spot I left off in the document. I prefer to have another document open for posting cuts, which you can toggle easily between in Windows by using hitting Alt-Tab.
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If you're going to be doing major surgery, I think it's best to just save in a new file. That gives you more freedom to do whatever seems best at the moment without having to worry about backing things up, since you've already done that.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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I keep a file called [Story Title]Scraps for each of my stories. As Survivor says, it does make me feel much more comfortable about cutting things.
Posts: 2022 | Registered: Jul 2003
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