Worducopia

Writer's Wednesday!!!

In honor of tomorrow's Thanksgiving festivities, my tip for this week is to gorge your writing with words.  I'm often rightfully accused of using far too many words to convey my thoughts when a simpler, more concise way would have sufficed.

Cutting out words in the editing process works better than adding.  So I say "go all out."  Here's an exercise you didn't ask for...  Edit the following sentences to make them stronger:

1)  John chained up his dog in the backyard.

2)  Reaching with trembling shoulders, Jim managed to lift the pterodactyl of a turkey over the candied yams, armada of gravy boats, sweating butter, crystal glasses placed way too soon, half-burned candles that his crazy cousin Patricia most likely lit an hour ago, and the vat of bean salad everyone will politely eat a forkful of and set it uneventfully in the center of the bowing table that threatened to split if they asked much more of it, just in time to save what feeling he had left in the fingers on his right hand that he burned on the roasting pan in spite of the thinner-than-it-should-be oven mitt with the nauseatingly cute cross-stitched pig on the wrist.

Now...  Which sentence gave you more editing productivity?  What's easier?  Making sentence two more manageable?  Or making sentence one more enjoyable to read?  Don't get me wrong.  Straightforward sentences are a good and necessary force in strong writing.

They punctuate and create rhythm while they emphasize.

If your writing is flat, dry, choppy, or overly simplistic, editing it will be a flat, dry, choppy, and ultimately mind-numbing experience.  Fill up your sentences with all the words that come to you without slowing you down.  Chances are that when you go back to edit (because we all know not to edit as you go) the extra words will help you find the perfect way to say what you want rather than have to create it from scratch.

In short, use verbosity in your earlier drafts and save the efficiency for the final ones.

Perfectionist's Guide to Poor Writing

Writers' Wednesday!

If you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times:  throw up, then clean up.

As a perfectionist, this is easier said than done.  I want to control the angle, distance, splash pattern, contents, colors, smells...  you get the idea.

The reason for throwing up is that edit-as-you-go is a complete waste of time.  Until you have finished whatever you're writing  (a limerick, protest sign, tweet, treatise on wolf calls, or great American novel) all that precious editing you've done will have to be redone anyway.  Again, and again, and again.  You can literally waste weeks perfecting some scene that will end up being deleted after the end when even you'll agree it doesn't belong.  The more time you wasted perfecting it will make it that much harder to get rid of when it has to go.

Now for the big question:  If you're a perfectionist one parallel positioning of the three-hole punch away from full-blown OCD, how will you ever manage to move on from one word to the next without electroshock therapy?

Candy.

I speak of candy in the general sense.  Could be cookies.  Could be fruit.  Could be dark chocolate covered peanut butter caramels...  for example.  Just be sure it has sugar and you give it to yourself after you've blasted through a mess of everything that rhymes with Nantucket but before you write about the man and his bucket.

It's not just the idea of the rewarding small steps that helps you forego editing for now.  The mind on sugar is as forgiving as Docker's pants with the little elastic parts by the belt loops.  And if you can caffeinate it...  Bingo!!  (thank you, Diet Dr. Pepper!)  I once knocked out a ten-pager on A Brave New World in five hours (including the time it took to "read" the last half of the book) all hopped up on No Doze, Mike&Ike, and a few soft drink cans.  I turned it in knowing my road to fame and fortune had just been paved on the most brilliant Huxley analysis ever!

Edit sober.  I repeat.  Edit when you are sober.  It's okay to stop mid-sentence and then proceed to rewrite the sentence without ever grazing the backspace key on a first draft.  But, those kinds of things need to be caught at least by the fourth draft.  And certainly before you think it's done.

Lemme take this time to advise that you write responsibly.  I am not trying to boost sales of insulin.  What I am saying is that if you (like me) are incapable of reigning in your perfectionist urges, find a way to motivate yourself to move on and find something that helps your mind not realize it just repeated the same word several times and managed to spell it differently every time.

What about you?  Are you a perfectionist?  How do you cope?  (And don't tell me you edit as you go.  That is just not an option.)