Keeping it Brief

I'm still in Hillary Mantel mode, mulling over all the things she said in her recent BBC2 interview and discovering nuggets of excellent advice. Amongst them is her revelation that she reckoned on cutting one third of every page that she writes.  Think about that!  One third of her entire output goes in the bin. I have known  inexperienced students in classes I have taught haggling over individual sentences, justifying their importance, and I don't entirely blame them.  If your time is precious and you have had to sacrifice something else in order to be able to write, then sweated hard over what you have written, chucking any of it away can be difficult to do.  Stories and novels are the offspring of your imagination and it's a terrible thought to inflict what you perceive to be damage on your own literary child.

However, just as parents can be blind to the faults of their sons and daughters, so writers can sometimes be unaware of the weaknesses in  their work.  If somebody suggests you make a cut, don't hesitate; what's more, look for other bits to snip out too. Stephen King once said that he cuts ten percent from the final draft of any manuscript -- that seems to me to be a minimum requirement. You could put this to the test -- fish out a piece of work you wrote a while ago and reduce it by a tenth.  I don't mind betting that the new version will be crisper, more vivid and packed with greater tension.

Slash and Burn

Yesterday, I cut 4200 words from my book -- just like that -- to use Tommy Cooper's immortal phrase.  I've been doing rewrites of my novel, painstakingly working my way through the notes my agent has given me, some of which concerned the ending of the story.  I've been mulling it over during the Christmas break, trying to see how the narrative might work from several different angles, psyching myself up, and then yesterday I picked up the knife / the scissors / the pen / whatever and started slicing.  It's a bit like going to the hairdressers and watching with alarm and curiosity as your head is shorn and your hair collects in drifts on the floor around your chair.  My book looks rather shorn at the moment, and I'm feeling a bit light-headed.

Although the lost material represent weeks of thinking and working, the cuts I have made are good, they are right, and I'm feeling reckless and bold for having made them - an excellent frame of mind to be in as I contemplate writing a different ending. I've saved the  pages in a file and no doubt I shall sift through them before I'm done, so that I can salvage a phrase here and possibly even a paragraph there, but in my heart I've let them go, and it was easier to to than I had imagined.

In my experience of having taught creative writing for a long, long time, people can be a little precious, a little overprotective of their work.  It's understandable.  You cheat the time to write (at weekends, in the evenings, when others are out having a life) so to jettison anything seems like such a waste, it can feel like sacrilege.

Try and think of editorial notes as a brand new opportunity to be seized and embraced.  The cuts I've just made have been purging and invigorating, they've created some space in which I can write new and better stuff, - which I'm about to do, right now.