People fulfilling their New Year’s resolutions do it. Clydesdales and greyhounds do it. Basketball, baseball, and football players do it. Well, not all football players. Offensive linemen do the opposite. The physician recommended that my next-door neighbor Bernie do it. Ralph Kramden should have done it. So should have Chubby Checker and Fat Albert.
“It” is a ritual known as trimming the fat. And all good writers need to do it. For writers, trimming the fat means something different than it does for a racehorse or an athlete. We writers don’t have to watch what we eat. We don’t have to frequent the treadmill, or indulge in sit-ups or daily jogging to trim our fat. But we do have to hunt down weak modifiers, colorless verbs, overused and unnecessary words, and clichés; a task that can be every bit as painful as passing up a juicy T-bone steak and a plate of chili cheese fries for a carrot and a bowl of dry lettuce. To the trained eye, however, those literary mistakes stick out like...well, like the overused cliché...a sore thumb. Does a sore thumb really stick out?
I had a sore thumb once, when I was ten. The batter hit a screaming liner down third. I snared the ball out of midair and landed awkwardly on the bag with my throwing hand buried beneath my chest, bending back "Tom Terrific." For the next two weeks, my thumb was in pain. Good old "Tommy Tutone" was a little swelled and bruised, but didn’t stick out anymore than the other nine pudgy digits on my hands. A better metaphor to use would be; those literary mistakes stick out like the fleas on a hairless monkey’s back. Better? The point of listing those mistakes is to explain that a writer must trim the fat from a first draft. A good story or book is rarely, if ever, complete after one sitting. A first draft is merely the foundation for a skyscraper. Each draft or revision adds the next floor on the tower.
Fluffy, meaningless words clutter writing. Much like the way our speech is filled with excessive words that don’t add to what we say. It would make for dull dialogue if an author chose to use the actual exchange of words between a courting young male and his first crush. “I ah...was wondering if um...maybe you’d like to, you know, possibly, maybe go out with me sometime, you know...to a movie or something.” We’ve all been through that in real life, but on the written page, the dialogue must be crisp and move the plot along or your reader will choose to watch a rerun of The Brady Bunch instead. Believe me, the Casanova of Clinton Ave., Greg Brady would have no problem getting a date the way our bumbling character does. Besides, reading is supposed to be an escape. I don’t want to read about a guy as dorky as I am with the ladies. I want to read about the super cool guy I’ve always daydreamed of being or the guy shrouded in mystery or the guy who rebels against everything I’m too afraid to even think about rebelling against. Take the main character in my novel The Toupeed Eagle for instance.
Darwin sashayed to Chloe. He caressed her warm cheek. “Such beauty would go well with pizza and a movie, no?”
Darwin gets the girl. He has to, to keep the plot moving. If he didn’t, there would be no point including the scene in the story, unless I wanted to show a flaw or weakness or make the reader feel sorry for him, which I do not. The first time I wrote that passage, it was boring and wordy.
Darwin walked slowly by Chloe who was standing next to the counter. He slowed down for a better look at her brown eyes, and then stopped. He placed his hand gently under her chin then rubbed it against her rosy cheek. “How about joining me for a pizza?”
In my revision, I chose stronger verbs (sashayed instead of walked, caressed instead of rubbed), eliminated unnecessary words (where Chloe stood was not important, nor were her brown eyes), and cut the weak modifiers (slowly, and gently). Trimming the fat made the passage snappy and direct. It conveyed the same meaning in three short sentences (twenty-one words) as my previous attempt had with four long, clumsy sentences and twice as many words. Trimming the fat is an editing essential and it takes time to master, but is worth every second, minute, hour, or year spent doing it.
“It” is a ritual known as trimming the fat. And all good writers need to do it. For writers, trimming the fat means something different than it does for a racehorse or an athlete. We writers don’t have to watch what we eat. We don’t have to frequent the treadmill, or indulge in sit-ups or daily jogging to trim our fat. But we do have to hunt down weak modifiers, colorless verbs, overused and unnecessary words, and clichés; a task that can be every bit as painful as passing up a juicy T-bone steak and a plate of chili cheese fries for a carrot and a bowl of dry lettuce. To the trained eye, however, those literary mistakes stick out like...well, like the overused cliché...a sore thumb. Does a sore thumb really stick out?
I had a sore thumb once, when I was ten. The batter hit a screaming liner down third. I snared the ball out of midair and landed awkwardly on the bag with my throwing hand buried beneath my chest, bending back "Tom Terrific." For the next two weeks, my thumb was in pain. Good old "Tommy Tutone" was a little swelled and bruised, but didn’t stick out anymore than the other nine pudgy digits on my hands. A better metaphor to use would be; those literary mistakes stick out like the fleas on a hairless monkey’s back. Better? The point of listing those mistakes is to explain that a writer must trim the fat from a first draft. A good story or book is rarely, if ever, complete after one sitting. A first draft is merely the foundation for a skyscraper. Each draft or revision adds the next floor on the tower.
Fluffy, meaningless words clutter writing. Much like the way our speech is filled with excessive words that don’t add to what we say. It would make for dull dialogue if an author chose to use the actual exchange of words between a courting young male and his first crush. “I ah...was wondering if um...maybe you’d like to, you know, possibly, maybe go out with me sometime, you know...to a movie or something.” We’ve all been through that in real life, but on the written page, the dialogue must be crisp and move the plot along or your reader will choose to watch a rerun of The Brady Bunch instead. Believe me, the Casanova of Clinton Ave., Greg Brady would have no problem getting a date the way our bumbling character does. Besides, reading is supposed to be an escape. I don’t want to read about a guy as dorky as I am with the ladies. I want to read about the super cool guy I’ve always daydreamed of being or the guy shrouded in mystery or the guy who rebels against everything I’m too afraid to even think about rebelling against. Take the main character in my novel The Toupeed Eagle for instance.
Darwin sashayed to Chloe. He caressed her warm cheek. “Such beauty would go well with pizza and a movie, no?”
Darwin gets the girl. He has to, to keep the plot moving. If he didn’t, there would be no point including the scene in the story, unless I wanted to show a flaw or weakness or make the reader feel sorry for him, which I do not. The first time I wrote that passage, it was boring and wordy.
Darwin walked slowly by Chloe who was standing next to the counter. He slowed down for a better look at her brown eyes, and then stopped. He placed his hand gently under her chin then rubbed it against her rosy cheek. “How about joining me for a pizza?”
In my revision, I chose stronger verbs (sashayed instead of walked, caressed instead of rubbed), eliminated unnecessary words (where Chloe stood was not important, nor were her brown eyes), and cut the weak modifiers (slowly, and gently). Trimming the fat made the passage snappy and direct. It conveyed the same meaning in three short sentences (twenty-one words) as my previous attempt had with four long, clumsy sentences and twice as many words. Trimming the fat is an editing essential and it takes time to master, but is worth every second, minute, hour, or year spent doing it.
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