Pruning

So when did you last have a good prune? I don't mean chewing on the wrinkly black things that are good for the bowels, or trimming your pubic hair, or chopping back your rose bushes... no, I refer to editing your written work.

I've dipped into Stephen King's book, On Writing, which is partly a collection of writing tips interspersed with humorous biographical accounts. But one thing in particular jumped out at me: when you write a story you're telling yourself the story, but when you rewrite you should focus on taking out all the things that are not the story. Get pruning. Cut the extraneous stuff. Sound advice?

Now... pass the prunes please ...

It sounds like a better version "Kill your children". Yes, you love that section of the story and yes you love the way you phrased things and yes it is hot as hell - but if it doesn't add to the story you have to cut it. If it breaks the flow of the story you have to cut it. If it is just wasted words you have to cut it. You might love those asides as if they were your own children, but to make a good book you have to kill your children...

Which I can never do, which is why my stories are long and winding.

One good way I found of doing this was a story challenge that I participate in on another board. This challenge has a word limit of 1500 words. When that's all you've got to work with, you tend to be more careful with how you use them.

(But what if you take out everything that's "not the story" and discover there's nothing left?)

I've always had a tendency to write brief stories (quite unlike the way I ramble when talking). I blame it on my 11th grade English teacher who limited any writing assignment to 2 pages. I HAD to write "economically." When I got to college, it was a real challenge to stretch things out to reach even a 5 to 7 page assigned length.

It's carried over to my fiction writing, where the bulk of my stories seem to be in the range of 2k to 3k words, and I've enjoyed slipping a complete tale (with plot and character development) into a 300 word snippet.

Even in my shorter works, though, I know there is extraneous stuff, dropped in for adornment and my own enjoyment, stuff that is "not the story," which I refuse to prune. Please don't make me do it!

So is this good advice from Mr King? Are the most revered works of fiction all short and pruned to a skeleton? I think perhaps not, but on the other hand maybe we have got it all wrong and Tolstoy, Dickens, Austen et al are just too verbose.

We all work differently but I like to rewrite a story several times. This is apparently the way James Joyce wrote his short stories. You revise again and again. Sometimes the story works well other times it doesn't. Sometimes something you think is a haunting, compelling, thought provoking, lyrical work of staggering genius turns out not to be quite the tour de force you thought it was and then again something you might have dismissed grows on you. I like reading how to write books but never pay much attention to any advice as I write the way I like to write. I am far too old and set in my ways to change now.

Stephen King is hardly one to talk about writing that is too verbose and longwinded. I stopped. trying to read most of his work long ago. He always seemed to be throwing in stuff, detaild, that seemed to have nothing to do with the story, often as not gratuious scatological or sexual elements.
Nothing against long novels per se, have many I love and enjoy for their detailed descriptions of time and place. Like Tolkien. Or The Once and Future King. And of course so many of the older classics, the Faulknera and Dickenses.

It is rather ironic as RSL says that Stephen King should be advising about watching for verbosity. His early work is fairly tight, but later stuff like The Stand and It (both really good books) do suffer from bloat and could be improved by some judicious editing.

Which, said another way, is: About any passage, you should ask yourself, 'In what way does this add to the story?" and if the answer's 'None', then PRUNE IT.

But where do you draw the line? Descriptions of settings, or of character appearance; passages of dialogue; paragraphs of reflection; or even passages of narrative action can all be extraneous to 'the story' sometimes, yet they add to the overall effect and reader enjoyment.

My pruning ('how can I say this more concisely?') can reduce the word count by 10%, but only rarely do I excise a whole paragraph on the grounds that it's 'not the story'.

I fear that if we followed Mr King's advice too closely, our library would be a poorer place.

On the other hand, if you're reading a story and find yourself thinking, "Oh for heaven's sake, dear Author, do get on with it, won't you?' (or perhaps, "Jeez! Move it, buster") then perhaps KIng's Law should have been heeded.

I'm currently listening to an audio version of this book.

It contains a word that ever writer of spanking fiction should know: verisimilitude.

What is verisimilitude? It is those little details that make your storiesrealistic. No, most us cannot write realism. A woman looking at a teen in anger before delivering a spanking? A man having enough of that brat and delivering a good spanking? That doesn't happen in the real world. Almost any form of non-consensual spanking crashes against the waves realism.

But verisimilitude? Those little touches that add a facade of realism to your story? Those are invaluable. Those are are the difference between unbelievable stories and those we nod as we read. Those are the details that make a story seem plausible...

Of course he uses the word in respect to supernatural fiction and other forms of fictions, but those little touches of realistic elements can make the difference between "this is so fake" and "this can't happen but I almost think it could happen".