I recently attended the World Horror Convention in Seattle and I came away from it with a new perspective on my writing. The bottom line is: nothing I write is sacred. There should be no word, sentence, paragraph or section that I should not be afraid to delete, modify, rework or completely rewrite.
It’s hard sometimes. We may have written a beautiful passage, one that flows, resonates, inspires. However, if it does not move the story forward, either in terms of plot, characterization, or establishment of setting or mood, then it needs to go. As you reread, scrutinize everything. Does it advance the story? Difficult as it may be, if the answer is no, strike it. Sometimes we have to kill our children, as more than one writing instructor has advised.
That’s not to say those words won’t appear somewhere else in your writing. A particular passage may just be out of place. Snip it out, file it away. Maybe you can use it where it is more apropos. Dialog is an especially negotiable quantity. It is easy to write and should be among the easiest things to cut. Don’t feel obligated to stick in dialog just because you think it’s about time someone spoke. If the dialog doesn’t reveal something new about the speaker or convey some crucial information to the reader, it is superfluous.
I encountered writers who, after getting editorial or critque-group feedback on a short story or novel, started completely from scratch. They rewrote the piece entirely. What a revelation that was to me! I have stories that start out well but get lost somewhere in the middle or toward the end. Having come to the end of the story, though, in the past I considered it to be essentially engraved in stone. This is the way the story goes. All that I can do to fix it now is to tweak it subtly, always ending up in the same place. I now see that it’s OK to lop off the head of the beast and let it grow a new one. Let the story go in a new direction if that’s where it wants to go. Oh, it hurts to see all those words get left on the floor like hair clippings in the barber shop, but they are only words. My words, but only words nonetheless. There are many more in the well to replace them.
Besides, these words are not lost. They have been returned to the well, where they may once again rise to the surface, to appear in something else in the future.
I submitted a lengthy short story to the writer’s workshop. I had a half-hour session with three published writers who critiqued my story, which is one that I wrote two or three years ago called “Eliza.” Whenever I see that title, I have a mental image of the story it represents. However, I’ve always felt that the tale gets lost in the final quarter and the ending is week. I have tweaked it, pruned it, removed about 20% of it, but I always ultimately arrived at the same place. As a result of this critique session, I now see a totally new direction in which this story can go. It changes the basic premise somewhat, but it is a stronger premise. The story, with these modifications, now no longer limps to its conclusion but arrives at it naturally, even though the ending is unexpected and – I hope – surprising. It is still difficult for me to think about “Eliza” without remembering the original form of the story, especially since I have not completed the rewrite, but in time I am sure that the new version of the story will become part of my memory as well. Perhaps the original will remain as well, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. It will serve as a reminder that my words are not sacred, that they can be sacrificed for the good of the story which, after all, is what it’s all about.