Cut, then cut again
Every successful writer knows that revising is a crucial part of the creative process. MJ Hyland explains how to go about distilling your novel to its essential core
I’ve never read or written a perfect first draft. Perfect first drafts don’t exist. And yet most writers, at the beginning of their careers, think they must. This intimidating myth of effortless gift persists because successful authors aren’t in the habit of admitting to writing weak drafts and rarely show the public their mistakes.
“Every writer I know has trouble writing.” Joseph Heller
The truth is that every beautiful, exciting and moving work of fiction is last in a line of at least a half-dozen carefully reworked drafts. Good writers are good because they have the right measure of intellect and talent for the hard labour of rewriting. Most writers haven’t the stamina for this exacting work, or are too thin-skinned, defensive, or too impatient to face the bad news that they haven’t got it right the first time round.
Rewriting accounts for the lion’s share of a writer’s work; the calculated and deliberate work that comes after the gleeful, and sometimes unconscious, first draft. Good writers, even the arrogant ones, are also humble and self-aware enough to know that revision is always necessary.
Fixing the first draft
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” Elmore Leonard.
Here are seven techniques which are sure to make your job of revision easier and more effective:
1 Remove exaggeration (tell the fictional “truth”). “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” George Orwell
2 Cut out cliches. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Anton Chekhov
3 Remove your failed similes. A bad simile is embarrassing, like a long joke with a weak punch line, told by a nervous comedian. “Kate inched over her own thoughts like a measuring worm.” John Steinbeck
4 Don’t attempt a final version of the beginning of the story until you know how it ends. (And don’t waste time fussing over the beginning until the rest of the work is done.) “Be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.” HW Fowler
5 Do at least one of the following to help you see your prose more clearly:
“Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.” Matthew Arnold
6 Don’t use more words than you need to and beware of fancy or ornate words. “I never write ‘metropolis’ for seven cents when I can write “city” and get paid the same.” Mark Twain
7 Make sure your adverbs and adjectives aren’t muting your verbs and nouns. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Stephen King
An example of poor prose
This is typical of the kind of thing I see in early drafts every day, and it can be cured, in time, if the writer has the right kind of talent and intelligence, and by applying the above principles:
The smell in the crowded pub was so vile that I nearly gagged. It was like the smell of a camel that’s been dead for three days. I whispered under my breath to Sarah, ‘That smell is so disgusting,’ and Sarah nodded so violently I thought her head would fall off, but she still looked beautiful with all her red curls wrapping round themselves like the golden tendrils of an ancient oak tree or like the snakes on Medusa’s head that we saw in the museum last week.
This bad prose is very bad. The descriptions are overwrought, dilute dramatic effect and undermine authorial and narrative credibility. To say “nearly gagged” is not just cliched, it’s barely credible. Something prosaic is better than the wrecking-ball of “gagged”. A more subtle and truer description of the smell would better serve to establish trust between reader and writer. Something like, “The pub smelt of whiskey and vegetable soup.” Most people know what whiskey and vegetable soup smell like, but few know the smell of “a camel that’s been dead for three days”. And the “crowded pub” is probably noisy, so the idea of “whispered under my breath” is tautological and untruthful.
As for the other errors, see if you can find them yourself and rewrite the paragraph knowing this: it’s crucial that the reader not only sees what you want them to see but also believes you.
“The best style is the style you don’t notice.” Somerset Maugham
Curing the fear of inadequacy
Many fledgling writers suffer from a problem that turns their prose into overblown mush: the idea that good writing is fancy writing, packed with complicated writerly flourish, staggering similes and metaphors, and that all great writing begins with a knock-out opening sentence.
Through most of my early 20s I thought the same. There was panic and lots of wasted, misdirected effort – time spent glued to the idea that I must prove my intelligence, at the cost of worrying about much more important things, such as character and truthful storytelling. I gave up chasing similes as good as Nabokov’s, and thought more about Chekhov’s compassion for character, and the brutal and compelling grace of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. I stopped showing off and set out to write drama void of conspicuous artifice.
When I quit trying to sound like a writer, I became more of a writer. I took my desire to impress off the page and listened to Leo Tolstoy:
Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.
MJ Hyland is the author of three novels, How the Light Gets In, shortlisted for the Commonwealth writers’ prize, Carry Me Down, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and, most recently, the Orange prize-shortlisted This is How. She is co-founder of Hyland & Byrne: The Editing Firm and her short story, Rag Love, was shortlisted for the BBC national short story award 2011