How to Murder. (Your darlings.) (In prose.)
We’ve all heard the advice to writers to “murder your darlings”. While I’ve been killing characters in entertainingly gruesome ways, the advice relates to prose.
I’ve recently went through an extensive exercise of tightening my prose (for a particular submission), and thought I’d share my experience and lessons I’ve learned — both good and bad, together with practical advice on how to handle this.
I’ve blogged about the Honourable Menti...
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David
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Mar 24, 2019 09:40AM
I maintain a list of "weasel words" - words o fragments I tend to overuse and do a specific scan for these during editing. I also use a piece of software called smart-edit that scans for all kinds of things, like repetition, redundancies and so on, which I find really useful. Using these I trimmed about 2k words from my latest novel, which I thought was fairly "tight" before running through this.
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David wrote: "I maintain a list of "weasel words" - words o fragments I tend to overuse and do a specific scan for these during editing. I also use a piece of software called smart-edit that scans for all kinds ..."I have such a list too! 😄
And while I don't like the automated software approach (I've tried several), the novella has been through both developmental editing and copy-editing. This was just a case of a hard look at meeting a specific word-count limit, that in turn forced me to be very critical about what is essential to the story and what isn't. It was illuminating :-)
Like Hemingway said, I have a great day writing when even the stuff I throw away is good.
I think automated software is useful for finding such things, but would never suggest it was a substitute for an editor. It's a tool, like any other. I find it helps my focus more on the specific words, rather than "reading" - when I read, I'm far too likely to skip over things from word-blindness.
David wrote: "I think automated software is useful for finding such things, but would never suggest it was a substitute for an editor. It's a tool, like any other. I find it helps my focus more on the specific w..."I know what you mean. I tested a few, and while they do highlight some issues I find that overall they kill my voice in prose (only my publisher is purple, my prose isn't 😜). Overall, I've come to the conclusion that I end up spending more time and money on them that I get back - i.e. I get better ROI if I just write/edit myself and and then work with a human editor.
FWIW, though, since I'm a hacker at heart I did build scripts that help me scan the manuscript for particular instances of my own bugbears. They are far too geeky and unpolished to share, but they are tailored specifically for me. I do find that as I write more I catch more of those in the moment, rather than later. I guess we all improve with practice :)
Like everything else to do with writing, it's a very personal aspect. There is nothing inherently good or bad - just what works for each individual author. I would certainly encourage others to trial various offerings and develop their own processes.
