INTRODUCTION

21 Steps to fog-free writing

That manuscript you’ve sweated over sure looks good, doesn’t it? You’ve reached into your soul and pulled out the Great American Novel.

Well, now we’re going to throw some of those wonderful words out.

Why? Because they fog up your meaning, suck power from your story, and put agents and editors on life support. Many newer writers’ work is foggy because they use unnecessary words that strip the vigor from their stories.

The real problem? They don’t know they’re foggy writers! Most will go through their lives repeating those mistakes and wondering why editors keep rejecting them. Yet many could become published, if they’d only take those unhelpful words out.

Professor William Strunk Jr., in his definitive The Elements of Style, put it this way:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

Put another way: The more words you eliminate without changing meaning and sacrificing detail, the clearer and more powerful your writing will be.

And, speaking of clarity, let’s be perfectly clear on this basic point. We are not taking words out simply to make the book lighter. We are not throwing them out on a whim. No, the words we want to chase away do specific, bad things to our writing. Examples? They weaken verbs. They introduce author intrusions. They form filters that separate us from the POV character. They create redundancies. They clog up our writing with misused and overused words. They allow the crippling passive voice to dull our action. In short, they keep us from being published.

That means one generally makes writing clearer and more powerful by taking words out, not by adding them.

This section of the book shows twenty-one writing problems that are solved simply by removing one or more words. I call solutions to these problems “Steps.” When you apply these Steps to your manuscript, you’ll be surprised at how much more powerful your writing becomes.

Every writer doesn’t face all these problems, of course. The average unpublished writer has serious troubles with perhaps a half-dozen, and occasional entanglements with most of the rest. The question is, which ones are tripping you up? To find out, you need to be aware of all twenty-one problems.

How to learn the 21 Steps

Learning the Steps is actually very simple. First, I describe the problem each particular Step resolves and discuss possible solutions. In most cases, I present a Fog Alert! sidebar that shows even more examples of problem sentences and their solutions. Finally, I ask you to edit a set of Exercise sentences with pen or pencil, right in this book, and to check your work against the solutions found in the appendix.

Finally, interspersed among the 21 Steps are nine short chapters of a melodrama titled Sarah’s Perils, which contain problems the previous Steps discussed. I ask you to edit each chapter—with pencil or pen, right in this book—and check your editing against mine in Sarah’s Perils Solutions, also found in the appendix.

Do these Steps really work? To find out, compare the Before and After examples in the following sidebar. Step problems have been built into the first example. The other two—Markup and Final—show the same passage after editing. Note the Steps cut verbiage by about 30 percent. More important, of course, we’ve made the writing clearer, more powerful—and more editor-friendly—without losing detail. That’s the whole idea!

You can start immediately to improve your own writing with these 21 Steps. As with Part One, I recommend that you edit your manuscript’s first chapter only as you work through this part of the book the first time. It will help set the principles firmly in mind. Then, do the rest of the manuscript, Step by Step. When you’re through you’ll have a much-improved manuscript that will appeal to editors and agents.

That’s it. You are only 21 Steps away from making your writing clearer and more powerful for the rest of your life. Have fun!