- 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

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...".

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.

In creativity writing,