REWRITES SHOULD REQUIRE TOURNIQUETS

RED, RED, EVERYTHING IS RED

Sitting here in Southern California these last couple of days watching wildfires boiling through the hills around the town I live in I was struck by something I saw on Twitter that directly referenced the writing life. It went something like this:

                         The house is on fire, my car was stolen, and the cat exploded. 1500 easy

                         words today, things are good.

While the disaster spread through the surrounding area I continued on like a runaway locomotive with the task of rewriting the novel I've written. One chapter at a time, red pen in hand, being as ruthless and unforgiving as I can bring myself to be. Not one page has avoided this cyclone of correction and mark-up aimed at reducing verbal diarrhea and clarifying my thoughts. All the while I try to keep in mind that arcane bit of editorial advice I picked up along the way, "In writing you must kill all your darlings."

This homily has been credited to any number of authors through history - Oscar Wilde, Chekov, Stephen King. Never one to let sleeping dogs get in a nap if I can poke at them with a stick, I went looking for reliable attribution for this. Turns out it comes from a lecture given in 1914 by Arthur Quiller-Couch entitled, "On Style", in which he railed against 'extraneous ornament';

        "If you require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this.: 'Whenever you feel an

         an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - 

         and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

What Quiller-Couch is telling us is to be as flamboyant as you want in the draft. Get the deadly sin of purple prose out of your system while you are still inventing plot, characters, and timeline, then be just as unforgiving with the eradication of the beast. What we feel to be the most precious turn of phrase, the most incredibly creative use of language, has no place in the reader's understanding of the story. All the flowers in the world will not cover the stench of self-indulgence.

Every phrase should serve only one purpose - advancing the tale you are telling. Do I need to understand why it took so long to potty train the main character? Probably not. Was the exact temperature centigrade necessary for me to understand it was a raw, damp day in East London? Doubt it. Is the character's name required in every line he or she appears in? Uh-uh.

Go like hell getting the story down and ignore all the surgical blood letting to come. But when the time arrives for fine tuning, your pages should come away looking like the runner-up in a knife fight - Bloodied from head to toe. Then, when you hit print the next time, the tawny beauty you envisioned will be on its way to completion. Do this enough times and eventually you can press the send button with a little less self-doubt - maybe.