Self-Editing and the Soul of Wit
Thoughts On Shutting Oneself Up
“Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself? What is its nature?”
—Hannibal Lecter (by way of Marcus Aurelius)
Sometimes I tell you, of an article, I’m not the best-suited person I know to write this article—but I’m the person you have, so, here I am, writing this article. For example, the article on kidlit might have been better served by one of my friends who publishes in that space, or the recent articles on interior book design and book covers could have certainly been addressed better by one of my friends who designs such things. As it is, I’m out here trying to make less, rather than more, work for my overloaded friends so unless I’m doing an interview, you only get Catherine.
Today’s story, though, can perhaps best be told by yours truly, because I am a person who would never stop rambling on if I didn’t have an iron editorial will. If you have ever met me, in person or virtually, then you know I never run out of things to talk about. I recorded a video the other day playing a video game by myself for hours and I don’t think I stopped talking to myself the whole time. If I had my way, I would just never stop communicating with people, and if no one is readily available I will communicate right into the ether.
I do this because I have a lot of thoughts, and also I think I’m funny. I’m always telling my friends, “I think I’m hilarious.” And my friends say, “Yes, definitely.” One way or another, they are humoring me. Either they think I’m funny, or they let me think they think I’m funny so I won’t try harder to be funny. My friends are very kind. The point is, nobody likes to hear the sound of their own voice—or the sound of their mechanical keyboard clacking—more than I do.
I can’t just ramble on forever, as I would like to, even though to you it might seem like I do. There’s a lot of reasons why. With Shelf Life, for instance, I have made a service-level agreement with you to provide a five- to ten-minute read each Tuesday and Thursday. I stick to that and enforce a limit on my word count—I don’t write more than what will take between five and ten minutes for the average person to read. And when speaking, it’s crucial to let others have their turn to speak as well. You can’t just monologue at people, not if you want to get along with them.
I hear from all corners that people believe writing should never be constrained. Say as much as you want to! People have asked me, why would you limit it? Is it to get more clicks? Why would anyone want less of your writing when they could have more? Writers and authors, too, are always bristling at word count limits: No one wants to be held to an arbitrary word count limit, 80,000 words for a science fiction novel, 120,000 words for a fantasy, 2,500 for a journal article—they have more to say, and they want to be given their druthers to write as many words as it takes to say it. Writing is consumed on-demand, after all. It’s not like someone is talking right at you and you can’t make them stop. As a reader, you control when and how much writing you consume. If someone has written more than you want to read right now, you can just stop reading it. Surely, there is no need to constrain the volume of words.
So today’s article is on the topic of why you should edit your work mercilessly for length, eliminating wordiness and redundancy with extreme prejudice, even though you don’t want to and everyone else you know thinks you should write as much as you want.
A caveat: Writing a great number of different pieces is great and I don’t believe there’s a reason to impose any limit on this. Write as many stories as you have to tell. But of each discrete piece of writing, have a sense of how long it should be for what it is. If what you’re writing is, in essence, a journal or diary—for your own eyes and your own entertainment only—then it doesn’t matter and you can go on for as long as you want to. If you are interested in making your writing available to others, then you should know about how much of it to generate.
Everyone in the business of publishing will tell you that when you are starting out, you are extremely unlikely to sell a work that is longer than what is considered the norm for the type of writing you do. The outlets that purchase short stories will tell you right up front—our word limit is X, it’s a firm limit, and shorter than that is better. If your novel manuscript runs overlength for the type of work that it is—a 150,000-word YA novel, for instance—the agents who send you feedback are going to tell you to make it much shorter.
This frustrates many writers who are looking to make that leap to become published authors. Established authors get to write a work of any length—look at how the Harry Potter saga got longer from book to book, for example, or compare the length of the earliest Stephen King books to the most recent. Is it that editors are just too lazy to read a really long manuscript from a newcomer? Is the price of printing and binding a larger book block the issue? What purpose could there be for imposing word count restrictions on writers, other than to save money?
To start, money does play a factor although it’s not the sole or biggest factor. The ways in which a book stacks up against its competitors in terms of form factor influence purchasing decisions in ways that the individual reader may not understand. Several Jim Butcher fans have told me—speaking of wizards named Harry—that they were disappointed in book sixteen of the Dresden Files as it was essentially all talk and no action, with all the payoff in book seventeen. Sounds familiar, as a lot of us were put off by A Feast for Crows, which was missing many of the character perspectives that fans liked best—all of which then appeared in the subsequent installment, A Dance With Dragons.
Look, if you’ve given your readers fifteen books that they liked and they were all pretty much exactly the same in terms of length and price point, you can’t just drop a twice-as-long book sixteen on the readership at a higher price point out of nowhere, even if your author is saying he can’t possibly cut the length. The higher price point will put off some readers, and that stinks, but more important, the form factor of the book is going to put off readers as well. The diehard fans will read it no matter how long it is, but there’s always a larger base of less-invested fans to consider. If you had the wherewithal to take in a 348-pager once a year and suddenly the time and energy investment goes up to 800 pages, you might reach for one of the many, many substitutes and just begin a new series.
A Feast for Crows, likewise, was coming in longer than its predecessor, A Storm of Swords, well before it was finished drafting, so the publisher requested to split it up. When you’re into the 1200-plus page range in print already and talking about going up by several hundred more pages, at this point you’re into a spine width that can’t be handled on the same presses as your previous books. There are just more printing presses configured to run off books in the normal range of spine sizes than there are specialty presses for printing huge books and tiny books. When you’re printing what you know will be a bestseller, you need a lot of copies created in a very short period of time and you might need more than one press operation to do it.
Ask me about securing offset printing press time during the summer of 2007. Seriously, ask me. I’ll talk about it for like six hours. My wounds have not yet healed.
That’s one challenge with lengthy writing. Not only that paper and ink are more expensive for a longer book, but that every single cost of the writing is more. Short fiction? It’s paid by the word. Books? Most of your editorial freelance workers get paid by the word—and, if not, then by the hour, which amounts to the same thing. The cost of the finished product is going to have to go up to compensate. Consumers as a rule do not love it when you raise the price for something on them after they’ve become accustomed to paying a certain price. Suddenly changing up the length of the installments mid series, likewise, puts off more readers than it pleases, and readers are decreasingly less likely to dive into an unknown quantity the longer it gets.
Beyond any of that, there is a much more important argument for brevity. People who are exposed to a lot of unedited writing, first drafts, and works by novice writers all know the secret—and here it is: Lean, spare, concise writing is almost universally better than verbose, wordy writing. The negative space that your writing leaves, the shape left by what it does not spell out for the reader, is just as important to your storytelling as what you do tell the reader and spell out for them. If you aspire to take your writing to the next level, then you should endeavor to finish—at the end of your self-editing process—with the fewest amount of words you need to tell the story.
As Dr Lecter asks Agent Starling in The Silence of the Lambs: “What is the first and principal thing?” In this case, the first and principal thing is the story you want to tell or the information you are trying to convey. The nature of the story, its essence. The words you use to tell it—like Jame Gumb’s killing women—are incidental to the essential nature of the story. The words happen, you bring them into existence, because that’s how a story gets written down and ultimately turned into a book. But the words are not, themself, the story.
Many new and developing writers over-write their stories. They’re concerned that their meaning, their intent, won’t be conveyed if they don’t give enough exposition. They’ve had this story growing in their mind for years, with all the accompanying details, and they don’t want to miss their chance to include absolutely all of it. That impulse is detrimental to the quality of the work. I touched on this while talking Tolkien awhile back—readers don’t want 100 percent of what you know about your story. Readers want 1 percent of what you know.
The usual Shelf Life article of today’s type follows a format of (1) introducing a common problem or issue with writing, (2) convincing you—or trying to—that my thoughts on it are correct, and then (3) giving you some tactics or advice on how to address this issue. Well today I’ve already hit my target word count—about a paragraph back, in fact—and I haven’t gotten to the advice yet.
Well, I warned you that I do tend to go on.
It’s fine. I am not to the upper limit yet, and as usual I do have some strategies for getting yourself close (or closer) to a target word count when you’re editing.
First, is some of the best and most difficult to follow advice I myself have received on writing fiction. I got it from a friend (hey Gail) who got it from a science fiction author she knows and it goes like this: When you have finished your manuscript, go back to the first chapter and delete it. Just cut the first chapter right off, and lead with chapter two. This advice is solid gold. Many developing and even seasoned authors load their first chapter with a lot of garbage exposition that absolutely nobody in the history of anybody has ever wanted to read. I am definitely guilty of this. Heaping a bunch of exposition into that first chapter makes me confident that I’ve prepared my reader to understand the context of the action when it starts happening, which frees me to start writing the action—usually in chapter two. Nobody wants to wait till chapter two to get to the action. The oldest writing advice is to start your story at the latest possible moment.
So if you’ve banged out your first draft and you are looking for places to start chopping—look no further than chapter numero uno. Lop it right off—cut and paste it into a separate document somewhere. When you start your revision process, pretend like that first chapter doesn’t exist and as you read beginning with chapter two, look for things that your reader really needs to know—find ways to work them in later. Resist the urge to be lazy and stick chapter one back on there.
Next, evaluate your subplots carefully for relevance. Subplots are great, complex novels need them, but they support the main plot—they should exist separately, without bearing on the main plot or main characters. If you have subplots you’ve thrown in because you have a side character you just adore, or there’s something really interesting about your world that you want to let the readers know about—consider whether those are necessary. Remember how Thranduil and Galadriel let the elves to Dol Guldur to throw down the Necromancer in The Hobbit? Not if you read the book you don’t, because that unnecessary subplot was only included in the ancillary Tolkien canon. It was not needed to tell the story of The Hobbit. Someone should have told Peter Jackson.
Finally, once you’ve been through a couple revisions and removed the low-hanging extraneous exposition and plot points, it’s time to look through your manuscript scene by scene. Of each scene ask, as Clarice was advised to, “what is its nature?” Does it directly support your plot and drive your story forward? Or do you find yourself reaching to justify why it’s important? Any time you hear yourself say, “Well it shows you something about my character’s personality” you should squint and look at that scene again. Every scene that has that character in it should be showing the reader something about that character’s personality. If you have a scene that only gives information about someone’s personality, you don’t need that scene.
As you read each scene to make this evaluation, further, consider the details. Ask yourself if you are giving the reader information they don’t need and, if you are, ask yourself why. You don’t need to eliminate every single element that isn’t purposeful, but you should be considering how much text you are devoting just to having fun with prose. One of the most memorable scenes from The Secret History, for me, was a scene in which the narrator looked out a window at midnight and described the striking sight of a birch tree in the midwinter moonlight. That didn’t directly move the plot forward but I’m glad it stayed in. On the other hand, The Secret History contained a lot of unnecessary details that went nowhere and supported nothing. That book did not have to be five and a half hundred pages long.
Did I ramble on a bit today? I did, but I’m still on target. That’s it, that’s the advice. Know the target, and ramble within reason. Write with abandon, then revise ferociously. Strike a balance. Hannibal Lecter would want you to.
I have survived my brush with the plague, as you can see, and I am back in full force. I think—I think—I know what I have coming your way on Thursday but there remains just the slightest, tiniest shred of doubt so I won’t say for sure and commit myself. It’s a topic I’ve been looking forward to tackling for a long time, and I hope you will pop by your inbox or my page in two measly days to check it out.
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