Craft of Writing

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Craft of Writing

David L. Bromwich

Write It Tight

Mickey Spillane once claimed in a television interview that he never wrote more than one draft of any of his novels. He said that if he couldn't get it right the first time, he should not be writing.

Oh yeah?

Even if Spillane did write only one draft, it's a fair bet that his publisher's editors had a lot of work to do to get the manuscript into shape.

No one gets it right the first time. Jeffrey Archer claims to write "about a dozen" drafts of his novels (in longhand yet!). Going from the ridiculous to the sublime, Robert Louis Stevenson considered the real task of writing only began once the first draft was finished.

A Role Model
Stevenson is an excellent role model for the aspiring writer. Deciding as a very young man that he wanted to be a writer, he set himself the task of studying the works of the acknowledged masters of literature. He became, in his own words, a "sedulous ape" as he spent hour after hour trying to reproduce the various writing styles of the great ones. As a result of his labours, Stevenson became one of the world's finest writers. Essays, poems, stories, novels—he was a master of them all.

The idea for the book that was to make his fortune came to him one night in 1886 as the result of an opium-induced nightmare. Early the following morning, he started to write. Three days later, what he thought would be the only draft of "The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was finished. When Stevenson read the work aloud to his wife and stepson, Mrs. Stevenson was very critical. She accused her husband of taking the line of least resistance and writing merely a piece of sensationalism. Stevenson was furious, gathered up his manuscript, and stormed out of the room.

He returned two hours later, and telling his wife that she was perfectly right, threw his manuscript onto the glowing coals that were burning in the fireplace. Three days of hard writing gone up in smoke!

Stevenson then returned to his own room and began to rewrite. After another three days of feverish work, the Jekyll and Hyde tale that we know today was finished. He had written 64,000 words in six days—more than 10,000 words per day, all in longhand.

Your First Draft Is Your Raw Material
So, do not, once you have hammered out the required number of words, switch off your word processor and sigh "That's that." Because it isn't.

Your first draft is like the lump of clay on the potter's wheel. It needs moulding into shape. Put the piece to one side for a few days and then read through it again. It is very difficult to be objective about our own work, but we have to make the effort. Remember: you are not just writing to please yourself, your objective is to achieve publication; therefore, you have to please your editor. Try to see into her mind (another difficult thing to do). She has to please her readers and will know exactly what they want to read. If the manuscript in front of you had been written by someone else and you were the editor, would you publish it? Try to be brutally honest. It's hard, but who ever said it was going to be easy?

Shorter = Better
Length is the first thing to be considered. First drafts are always too long. Go through your manuscript and eliminate any words, phrases, or paragraphs that are not pulling their weight. Be ruthless. You may find it helps if you read the work aloud.

When writing to a specified word count, it is a good idea to write a hundred or so more words than are required, then go to work to prune the piece back until it is just inside the maximum word allowance. Shortening a manuscript almost always improves it. Look for the spurious use of words such as "really," "rather," and "very" (e.g., "really awful," "rather awkward," "very true"). Of course, you wouldn't dream of using tautologies like "true facts" or "adequate enough," would you?

Kill The Cliché
Clichés detract from the impact of your work. Hunt them down like the vermin they are and exterminate. Read through every paragraph more than once. Ask yourself if you can use less words and still say what you want to say. More often than not this is perfectly possible.

Read that last sentence again and change "more often than not" to "usually," and delete "perfectly." Point taken? Be a sharpshooter, not a machine gunner.

It may be that your manuscript can be improved by changing the order of certain paragraphs. Some experimentation will soon determine this. Does your opening paragraph plunge straight into the heart of the matter, or is it just introductory waffle? Perhaps your manuscript would be more effective without it.

Short Is Not Sweet
Being economical with words does not mean that you should write only short sentences. This would make your work seem staccato. The effect would not be pleasant. Readers would be unsettled. They might stop reading. Editors would be upset. You wouldn't get any more work published.

Sentences need to vary in length to give your prose a sense of flow and make the reader feel good. You can do this and still cut out all the unnecessary words.

Be Your Own Sub-Editor
Revising and rewriting a manuscript may seem a bit of a chore, but it has to be done. If you analyse your first draft carefully, you may get away with just one rewrite. However, you should be prepared to rewrite the rewrite, especially if requested to do so by an editor.

In these days of tight budgets, sub-editors are a luxury, especially on small press magazines. If you can present an editor with a script that needs minimal or no subbing you vastly increase your chances of having your work accepted.

So remember—write it right, write it tight!