The intrepid explorer hacking a sinuous path with her sharp and trusty brush hook—a well-worn heirloom from her sainted mother—exhaled soft whispers of shocking profanity with every breath as she severed the stout stalks and sharp brambles that barred her way through the sinister thickets of dank green and crimson weeds.
Alas, the poor sentence, its action strangled by verbiage! Severe pruning is needed (unless you're working on an entry for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest). Some writers are bleeders. For others of us it's like pulling teeth. Either way, getting the words out is only the first step. Next comes editing. One trick is to highlight adjectives, asides, redundancies, clichés, and verbs ending with –ing. And, for a start, let's assume that all the information is necessary.
The intrepid explorer hacking a sinuous path with her sharp and trusty brush hook—a well-worn heirloom from her sainted mother—exhaled soft whispers of shocking profanity with every breath as she severed the stout stalks and sharp brambles that barred her way through the sinister thickets of dank green and crimson weeds.
Now you're ready for an exercise in verbal economy. Susan Bell, in The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself, describes an exercise from theater school and applies it to editing when she suggests we edit away much of our prose to "see how the scene plays spare." So let's keep the original to compare it with the spare version and then edit away:
The explorer hacked a path with her brush hook. She exhaled profanities as she severed stalks and brambles through the thickets. She kept the brush hook sharp; it was from her mother.
The basics are here, bare bones and dull. No dialog, no images. You might want to play with it. I did.
I'll post my version next week.
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