Repeat the mantra: Writing is when I make the words. Editing is when I make them not shitty.
– Chuck Wendig
Tag: editing
Quotable 402
Writing, along with fire-making and the invention of the wheel, is widely held to be a milestone of human progress. This view will seem naïve to anybody who has read much human writing. … The true wellspring of civilization isn’t writing; it is editing.
– Nathan Heller
Quotable 167
Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better.
– Thomas Mallon
Pen to Paper: The Declaration of Independence
“It is the glorious 4th of July!”
– John Adams
And so it is. Today we celebrate the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson. John Adams had noted Jefferson’s “happy talent for composition” and “remarkable felicity of expression” and assigned the paperwork to him. Unlike young men today, Jefferson protested that he was the junior member of the committee; surely an older, wiser, more experienced man such as Benjamin Franklin or Adams himself should write the crucial paper. Adams responded that anything he wrote would be savaged merely because it came from him. Besides, he told Jefferson, “You write ten times better than I do,” which is something you wouldn’t hear from a lot of older, wiser, more experienced men.
Continue reading “Pen to Paper: The Declaration of Independence”
Quotable 52
It’s perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
– C.J. Cherryh
Pen to Paper: Omit Needless Words
I recently entered Round Five of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest. The opening and closing lines were given; all I had to do was fill the space between them without exceeding 600 words. I wrote my story and the word count read 772. So I began to edit. (Unfortunately, the contest rules don’t permit me to post the story, so I can’t show you specific examples. I’ll do that with another story in a bit.)
To tighten a story, start with the low-hanging fruit. As King Arthur did Excalibur, so I wielded Rule 17 from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style: “Omit needless words.” Find three words doing the work of one and replace them: “about that time” becomes “then.” Find words that aren’t serving much purpose: “in the bottom drawer” is better than “in the bottom desk drawer” if you’ve already referred to the desk. Look for unnecessary adjectives: “He put on his blue coat and went out.” Do we need to know the color? If not, toss it out. This is a quick and painless way to reduce wordiness.
Preamble for the Copy Editor
We the copy editors of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union of words, establish grammatical justice, ensure linguistic tranquility, provide for the comma defense, promote the gerund’s welfare, and secure the blessings of our First Amendment liberty to ourselves and our prose poetry, do order and endorse our stylebooks for whatever organizations still value us.