Craft of Writing

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Craft of Writing

Donna Sundblad

The Climb From The Chaos Of Clutter

After 16 years in the same house, the day arrived. Numbered boxes corresponded to the map of the floor plan. The truck backed into the driveway; in short order, the organized containers lined the walls of our new home. The milieu held a semblance of order, but the boxes waited in their designated rooms to be unpacked. Things needed to be put where they belonged.

Like my new home, a clean sheet of paper fills with paragraphs packed with information as my imagination unloads and takes printed form. The rough draft manifests a form of orderliness, but the task ahead requires things to be put in logical order.

Clearing The Clutter
Before the move, we gave away, threw away, and held a garage sale. Do the same with your manuscript. Search for and eliminate verbal clutter. Read your text out loud. Get rid of weak verbs and the unnecessary words that gather around them. Watch for redundancies and throw them out. Eliminate, change, rearrange, and tighten the focus. Let go of superfluous sentimental clutter. You may love a descriptive phrase or clever line of dialog, but if it does not move the story forward, it clutters.

For instance, in the novel I am currently editing, I wanted to hold onto the phrase, "like a snake shedding his skin." I tried to rework the paragraph. I liked the picture the clause painted, but I pitched it along with a couple of the sentences attached to it. Like it or not, they did not help to move the story along.

Organize
Now that you’ve cleaned out the obvious unneeded elements, it is time to organize. Imagine life in your new house. Focus on the kitchen. Picture your silverware scattered throughout the kitchen with knives in one drawer, spoons in another, and the forks on a shelf in the cupboard. Now, imagine these same utensils stacked in separate compartments of a tray stored in an easy-to-access drawer. The silverware did not change. The state of order or disorder makes the difference. The same reasoning applies to writing.

Logic dictates the need for a beginning, middle, and end. Read through your manuscript. Locate your hook. Whether you lead into your piece with a quote, pertinent statistic, or a short narrative, the purpose of the hook is to grab the readers' interest and give them a hint of what is to come. Tucked somewhere within your draft, your hook waits to be moved to a place of prominence—the beginning. You may find it buried in the second or third paragraph or lost somewhere on the third page. Be willing to rearrange.

Arrangement
When my son was about nine, he rearranged his bedroom. I never changed the room because the small size offered limited possibilities. The door thudded against the footboard of his bed. I squeezed my head through the opening to see the closet door similarly blocked by the second bed. We worked together and returned things to where they'd been for years, but in the process moved the dresser into the closet. Everything fit; the change offered more space. The room no longer looked cluttered. It made logical sense.

You don't want poor arrangement to cost you a reader. In fact, now that you’ve hooked the reader, the goal is to keep him interested. Make him care. Engage him. Your beginning scenes should introduce a character or two and the conflicts they face. These scenes operate as portals. The reader enters believing you will deliver the rest of the story.

The middle adds backstory, heightens conflict, heads toward resolution, and helps us to better know the characters. The paragraph originally marked for an opening scene may not fit where you first thought. It's no different than realizing the dresser fit in the closet. In fact, I’ve been known to eliminate my first paragraph entirely. Sometimes it serves as a springboard to activate my muse, but other than that it becomes as disposable as packing paper.

Watch for inconsistencies in your character’s development, the time of day, and placement of objects from one scene to another. This is where logic and unity work as partners. Everything should be connected.

When writing longer, involved stories, I recommend keeping a list of places your main characters visit, the objects they accrue along the way, and the people they meet. I also track their desires in an effort to maintain unity. If a character obtains a sword in Chapter 5 and it disappears by Chapter 8, your reader will wonder what happened to it. It hinders the forward movement you’ve worked to establish as the reader starts to wonder if he missed something.

Unity
I remember when I had to choose paint colors. It seemed easy enough. I planned to go with off-white. The painter pulled six cards within two color families. He explained that these colors would make the woodwork and walls complement the furniture and offer a sense of unity from one room to the next. He narrowed my choices to help pull it all together.

It is no different in our writing. The risk involved in eliminating large chunks of text is loss of unity. Unity, logic, and coherence work together to form a braid of consistency. Remove one and the braid unravels. Together they bring harmony and oneness. Think back to your hook. It identified your purpose. You are responsible to deliver what you offered. As writers, it is our duty to build a catwalk from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and chapter to chapter. We not only provide the bridge, but signs along the way that point the reader to the conclusion. If a bridge is missing, you force the reader to make a leap. He lands dazed and confused within a disconnected thought. Look at your work from the reader's point of view. Read your writing as if for the first time. Watch for abrupt breaks between ideas.

Flashbacks provide ample opportunity for rough transitions. The writer builds a bridge to take the reader by the hand into the past and bring him back to the present. Be careful to provide the guardrails of unity and logic to prevent the reader from becoming lost or disoriented.

Point of view affords another pitfall when it comes to cohesion. The reader follows the bridges you provide to make the transition from sentence to sentence or scene to scene. One of the tools used to supply the details they see is point of view. It belongs to the main character, the author, or a third person omnipresent source. Keep your point of view consistent throughout each scene. An abrupt change in POV breaks the cohesive thread of unity and logic you’ve worked so hard to weave.

Final Touches
The end of your story offers the opportunity to tie up loose ends, resolve conflict, and lead to a logical conclusion. Think of it as the final decorating touches in your home—the throw pillows that pick up the color of your carpet, or the bathroom towels that match the wallpaper border. This segment must be connected to the rest of the story in every detail. Fine-tune your ending. It is the part of your story that leaves a lasting impression and is equal in importance to your hook. A satisfying end will lead people to recommend your story to others.

When you’ve eliminated verbal clutter, united your words in a logical sequence, and tied them together with smooth transitions, set your work aside for a couple of days. It’s like working in your kitchen after you’ve moved in. You find little things that need to change. Read through your text with a fresh perspective and ask yourself these questions.

Does my plot make sense? Or does it require the reader to make a leap into the uncertain? (Logic)
Are the beginning, middle, and end unified? (Unity)
Have I provided the bridges necessary to make the transition from scene to scene? Is there a gap that may leave the reader wondering what happened? (Coherence)

If you follow these steps to throw out clutter and repair inconsistencies, you have taken the steps to move from a cluttered manuscript fraught with potential to distract from your story to a neat, orderly piece ready for submission.