less is...more?

Writing a novel or a memoir is publicly spilling your guts. You've put it all out there, and now you're ready to ask someone to read it. Maybe even pay for it. But what can you say about your editing?

 When I was in college, back in the stone ages, one of the most useful exercises I did to perform was to write a two page essay. Big deal, right? But it came back with comments and a grade, and a mandate to cut it to one page, while retaining the essence of the essay. Okay. Did that with a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. And then it came back again. This time with the tall order to cutting it by half again, without letting the content suffer. It was difficult. I did it. And I really learned something. I couldn't tell you what I wrote about, but I can tell you that I learned that a lot that we spill onto paper can be cleaned up. Cleaned up again, and then dusted off and polished. Writing without editing is the equivalent to crying without tissues. It's messy, less than discreet, and the people looking on are made vaguely uncomfortable.

So how do you go about editing your work? It's your perfect baby. Your baby's perfect. As an editor, of course I'm going to say that the first line of defense is to have an editor. It's always better to give birth with a doctor in the room, right? And asking friends to read and comment is roughly equivalent to asking your grandmother what she thinks of your baby. Even if she notices the a pointy head and odd ears, she's going to love it. It's yours, and s She loves you.

So, if you can't afford an editor, do what I'm doing here. Make the task slightly less daunting. Choose two pages, copy them into a new document, and start the surgery.

You are looking for extraneous crap. Things you don't give your reader credit for knowing from context. You wrote, "she had long, lovely hair streaming down her back that shone auburn in the evening light." Do you really need "streaming down her back"? I think not. Your readers know, or fervently hope, that her long hair is not streaming down her face. Try taking it out. Even if you decide to leave it after the exercise, you have made a decision. You have edited. And what about "lovely"? I'd opt for something more descriptive. Try a rewrite. "Her hair fell in a cascade of waves, shining auburn in the evening light." I think it's better. Oh. And now that I look at it, my original sentence has a weird construct, implying that her back was shining auburn in the evening light. Good to recognize. Better to take some time to edit. Best to excise the errors before some persnickety reader gives you a huffy review on Amazon.

Verbal Quirks

When editing works by others, I am struck by the quirks that show up over and over. I have one author who can't resist, "and thus". And thus, her work is propelled to the next idea or thought. Another seems stuck in hell. As in, "Hell, it was more than he could have expected." And, "Hell, he was there anyway."

Verbal quirks can be quite useful in framing a character's personality. The trick is to be sure that the quirk remains theirs alone. If it starts showing up in other characters, or in descriptive paragraphs, the reader is going to know that it is your verbal quirk, and the author has suddenly inserted himself into the story, which is usually jarring, and a detriment to the willing suspension of disbelief.

The exception, of course, is when the story is framed around a first-person narrator. In that case, verbal quirks can help the reader see into the narrator's mind. But be careful--you want that to be the narrator's mind--not the author's. Unless they are one in the same.

Most writers tend to have a strong voice and language skills formed by both place and time. So how do you avoid the pratfalls of your own linguistic quirks? That's where the 21st century comes to your aid. If you are writing in Word, and let's face it, most of us are, then part of the editing process involves using the "find" function. When reading your manuscript, make sure you note repeated uses of words or phrases. If "hell" shows up more than four times in a couple of chapters, do a search on "hell" through the whole book. "Find" is on the Home tab, to the far right, if you are on any version of Word from about 2003 on. Click on it, type in "hell", and see what it finds. If you have more than a dozen or so occurrences in a 250 page book, they merit a look-see, and some careful consideration. Do they need to be where they are? Do they advance the story, or say something about the character?

Part of the writing process is learning a bit about yourself, and in the process, learning about your verbal quirks, where they work, and where they don't. Think of it like taking your baby to the pediatrician. As much as you adore your baby, you'd probably prefer that the pediatrician mentioned that your baby has six toes on both feet--an anomaly you were blinded to because they are such cute, soft little feet . You'd want to know the consequences of that, and whether or not it was prudent to do something about it. A good editor can help you do the same thing with your precious tome. First, to make you aware of any anomalies, and then to advise you on the merits of some judicious surgery.

If economics dictate that you must be your own editor, then it's time to make sure you are your harshest critic. And cultivate a well-read friend or two. Ones who are willing to be frank about what they've read. And ones that you are willing to listen to. All defenses down. Ready to go back and excise those quirky appendages that may be getting in the way of a very good read.

one thing leads to another

To the fairly well-educated and logical mind, with its cache of about 20,000 or so words (an estimate that fluctuates by study),  there are more than a few words that seem to mean something other than what they actually mean. They can be a trap for writers the same way that obscure, complex usage rules are. With usage rules, it is generally accepted among authors that if one knows the rule it is sometimes acceptable to bend or break the rule for reasons of style. Not so much with words and their meanings.

One of the pitfalls lurks in the concept of "word families." An easy example of a word family is the word family for tone. If you know what tone is, and you know the general concepts of word forms, then you likely know the meanings of toned, toning, tonal, tones, and probably even intoned without much thinking about it. You could probably infer the meaning of tonicity if you ran across it, from your understanding of the root word tone and your understanding of word forms. The trapdoor opens when you decide to use tonicity in your own writing, without verifying your understanding of the meaning. Writing, "the tonicity of the painting's colors was inspirational" will make most people think you are making up your own words. It will make people dealing in medicine and biology laugh, because tonicity is a term specific to the state of firmness or functional readiness of body tissues or organs. It's fine to trust your instincts when reading a new word form, better to verify when you are using one.

Peril looms as well within the concept of "receptive knowledge" or your ability to infer the meaning of a word in the context of it's use. For instance, if you ran across a passage that said "the accident victim was dizzy and discombobulated", even though you might not be familiar with discombobulated, you might be able to deduce, through your receptive knowledge of the way people usually respond to accidents, that the victim had been thrown into a state of confusion. You could merrily read on, certain of what was going on, without ever adding discombobulated to your active vocabulary.

The risk starts when you add a word to your active vocabulary without ever really understanding what it means. That can happen when you read a word misused by the author using it. Through general reading, it would be simple for any reader to misconstrue the meaning of infer. Infer is so commonly misused when imply is what is intended that the error has perpetuated alarmingly. The meanings are opposite. If you write, "she inferred that I was a total jackass," those readers who know the difference between inferences and implications will assume that you did something to make others conclude that you were acting stupidly and offensively. If you were just minding your own business in the "10 items or fewer" lane at the supermarket with two lemons that you counted as one item of ten, and she was glaring at your basket then shooting you the stink eye, then she was implying you were a total jackass. You may have inferred from her over-reaction that the woman was a total nut-case. Who gets that incensed about a lemon?

Here are a few common word traps that snare many writers, both through assumptions about word families and receptive knowledge of the way language is commonly used:

• Penultimate—one of my favorites, because I was a willing victim. I always assumed that it was a stupid inflation of a perfectly good word. Something along the lines of saying something is "more unique" or "beyond infinite". Things ultimate, unique, or infinite are by definition insuperable. Through receptive knowledge I came to the incorrect conclusion that penultimate was just another example of language inflation for the sake of puffing up the image of the writer or speaker. Then one afternoon, I heard it used so often during the coverage of a race in the Tour de France that I decided to look it up. It means "second to last". That's it. We were watching the second-to-last race. A perfectly serviceable word. Just be aware that when you describe something as the penultimate example of, say, shrimp fra diavlo, that you are saying that there is something coming next that will be the last word on what a shrimp fra diavlo should be.

• Conflate—is not the same thing as inflate, aggrandize, or amplify. To conflate is to bring together; combine disparate parts into a composite. If someone conflated his resume, it doesn't mean he exaggerated his qualifications. Or it shouldn't anyway. It more properly means that he decided to combine his resumes for mime and quantum physics in the hopes that his combined skills would attract employers in need of  someone who could explain string theory entirely through dance.

• Insure—means to call Afflack for a policy. Ensure means to promise certainty. Insuring yourself against sky-diving accidents ensures a depletion of your bank account.

I know that's just three examples of oft misused  words, but this is running long. So just consider, in a free moment, looking up a few of these: nauseous, comprise, decimate, apprise, bemuse, whence, continual/continuous, dissemble, disinterested/uninterested, peremptory, sensual/sensuous, venial/venal.

The list could go on ad nauseum, but those are some interesting examples. I hope it encourages you to be curious both about the language you read and the language you use.