Over the weekend, while the weather was still fine, I edited my garden. By editing, I mean sawing off whole branches of our aggressive Buddleia, cutting back leggy shrubs and unwinding bind weed, endlessly.
Slash and burn, horticultural style. By the time that we had finished, and it took the best part of a day, we could make out individual plants, see the path winding down to my little shed at the bottom, see the shed itself. Even though the garden looked shorn, it had definition. Some of our chopping seemed radical and I hope we haven't killed too many tender perennials along the way but, perhaps it was because we were doing hard physical work in the sunshine, it felt elating, and the end result was a vast improvement on how the garden looked before.
Editing is hard intellectual work. It can be hard emotional work as well, because sometimes you end up chopping out something that you really like for the sake of the story as a whole. A highly polished phrase that you spent half an hour crafting, if it slows down the action, or is out of character, or overwrought, simply has to go. You need to learn to be ruthless. Just as cutting back a rose permits new growth, so clearing the dead wood from your work will create spaces in which you can write better. And although you may end up with a pile of paragraphs (and even chapters) as big as my heap of garden waste, it can be weirdly elating: it makes you prioritise value over effort, and that's the starting point for writing well
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