Brrr, the ancient floor furnace has gone kablooey and I’m relying on those oil-filled radiators that plug in.  Not quite as good, but they work.  Hopefully it’s just the thermostat, because no one will work on the damn thing, and I don’t have $10,000 to spare for a new furnace and ductwork.  Come on, Publishers Clearinghouse!

Today’s post is about cutting. No, not the kind you do to your wrists, or your enemies, but to your manuscript.  It’s all part of revision, the bugbear for so many writers.

How do you know what to cut?  You can start with the obvious: material that doesn’t belong.  Let’s say I wrote a story about a mad killer in the Batman universe, who strikes during thunderstorms, and Batman has to figure out how to catch him before any more innocent Gotham citizens are harmed.  And imagine I wrote a long section explaining atmospheric disturbances during thunderstorms, how lightning works, etc.  Would it belong in the story? Only if Batman needed it to find the killer.  Otherwise, it’s only a digression.  No matter how excellently the thunderstorm trivia is written, it shouldn’t be there.  Its only purpose is to move the plot forward and if it’s not doing that, it has to go.

A more elegantly written, literary work might have a bit more room for meandering, but in plot-driven commercial fiction there is little time for asides. No one cares. They only care whether Batman will find the guy in time to save the pretty heroine, or perhaps his beloved Alfred, who is knocking about Wayne Manor, unaware that the killer, posing as kitchen help, hid in the pantry during the ball and the thunderstorm is raging and he is now sneaking up on our poor, unsuspecting butler/father figure with a huge knife—EEP!

If I stopped that kind of suspense to tell you how lightning is formed and it had nothing to do with Alfred’s rescue, you would clout me with my own book and I wouldn’t blame you.

Words and phrases that are extraneous clutter your manuscript.   In William Brohaugh’s excellent Write Tight: How to Keep Your Prose Sharp, Focused and Concise, he reminds writers to watch for unnecessary adverbs. Look for phrases like pulled off (or off of, which is especially heinous), called out, dropped down, etc.  The verb is fine by itself; it doesn’t need the extra word, because we know what is happening.

He pulled a piece from the crusty loaf.

Alice called to the White Rabbit.

The knife dropped and the killer began to cry.

Most of these modifiers come from the way people speak. But you’re not going to write the way you speak, are you?  I confess, I’m very bad with this, and I must have cut thousands of extra adverbs, adjectives and prepositions from my book.  Since I’m cutting again to reduce word count, I’m sure I’ll find many more that I missed.

Another thing Brohaugh mentions is checklists in your descriptions.  I had trouble admitting that I did this one.  Here’s an example from the first draft of Rose’s Hostage, a scene where the captive Libby has been allowed upstairs to take a shower:

This bathroom was white, with a colorful floral shower curtain and matching window dressings, and green towels. White wicker accessories – a tissue holder, magazine rack (empty – didn’t anyone read around here?) and one of those tall toilet paper reserve containers that held several rolls – studded the room and the walls were decorated with faded flower prints. The overall effect was of a garden.  It was much nicer than the bathroom downstairs, with its silly ceramic fish and light-devouring blue walls.  She wondered who had done the decorating.  Obviously it hadn’t been updated in some time, but at least someone had tried to make this room a pleasant one.

And now in the fifth draft:

This bathroom was white and green with floral trim. The accessories were white wicker and framed botanical prints decorated the walls. It was much nicer than the bathroom downstairs.

Better, no? Obviously no one cares if the bathroom has a toilet roll holder; we all know what accessories are usually found in a bathroom, and it’s not necessary to list them.  Three sentences and only twenty-nine words.   I hope you can see it just as well.

If I described the bathroom too well, the reader would not have his/her own unique picture of it.  When I read The Lord of the Rings, I see the Shire in a very different way than someone else might.  It’s not that Tolkien’s descriptions are sparse, but that each person has his/her own filter and my vision of the bathroom or the Shire will be my own.  It will remain in my mind and I’ll revisit it each time I read the book.

Try a bit of cutting on your own work. I promise it won’t hurt.  Not much, anyway.  If you have any tidbits to share on this topic, please feel free to post in the comments.

Poaste number ten! Wow, that went quickly.  When I started this blog, I worried that I would have nothing to say.  Of course, anyone who knows me knows that’s not entirely true!

At a loose end, I was paging through some old school papers and found a hilarious English assignment that apparently was about colloquialisms, the countrified version in particular, although I can’t for the life of me remember exactly what the assignment was.  About ten years ago (boy, time flies), I dated Farm Boy, who lived in a rather rural area round these parts.  Their family was close-knit, practical, loyal and hilarious.  I learned a lot of new words from them.

There was you’uns, as in “You’uns come over here for Christmas.”  I had NEVER heard that before I met Farm Boy.  I reckon is another one, but I hear that from my dad, who hails from Texas and says rinch for rinse and warsh for wash, as well as light bub for light bulb.  Most of these seem to be a matter of pronunciation and not words in themselves, as do others like cain’t, aigs (eggs), and idear (idea).

Holler is another one, as in “You’uns go down in that holler and get a deer.” Crick is a good one, as in “Get them cows across the crick.” That’s another one my dad says. Other assorted phrases include “Git’er done,” “Rode hard ‘n put up wet,” “I gotta pee like a rushin’ race horse,” “I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age!” and, said in response to someone’s glee that the speaker didn’t share, “If I had a feather up my ass, we’d both be tickled.”

Entertaining, no?  A bit much for fiction, however.  I’ll explain why.

The use of colloquialism and dialect in writing adds color and character to dialogue, but a writer must be careful not to go too far.  Probably the most famous (and the most parodied) is the slave dialect in Gone with the Wind.  Mitchell’s dialogue may or may not be authentic, but it’s certainly hard to read.  Critics have said that her portrayal of slaves is racist.  All I know is reading all those gwines and Ahs drove me bats the first time.

Pages of phonetically-spelled dialogue require the reader to concentrate and can thrust him/her out of the story.  Dialect should never be obvious; when you’re striving to capture a character’s voice, it needs to reflect that character, not exaggerate or parody him, unless you’re trying to poke fun.  Exaggeration is irritating, stereotypical and even insulting.

Mark Twain was well known for using dialect; he could be heavy-handed with it at times.  For example, in Chapter 14 of Huck Finn, Huck is educating Jim:
I read considerable to Jim about kings and dukes and earls and such, and how gaudy they dressed, and how much style they put on, and called each other your majesty, and your grace, and your lordship, and so on, ‘stead of mister; and Jim’s eyes bugged out, and he was interested. He says:

“I didn’ know dey was so many un um. I hain’t hearn ’bout none un um, skasely, but ole King Soller-mun, onless you counts dem kings dat’s in a pack er k’yards. How much do a king git?”

The first paragraph, Huck’s first person narrative, is relatively free of hyperbole, but in the style of the day (and still perhaps in Margaret Mitchell’s time), the slave dialogue is rendered in such a way as to emphasize the difference between the two.  It’s too much and has also been vilified as racist.  But dialogue aside, Huck Finn was a landmark work in that it portrayed the black character, Jim, as a real person and not a caricature, albeit seen through Huck’s (a young white boy) innocent eyes.

Twain did not use a great deal of dialect in his book Roughing It, but the language is colorful.  He wrote character-revealing dialogue which was almost as good as a tape recorder.  Take an exchange with the ruffian Arkansas in the protagonists’ mining company:

“Mr. Arkansas, if you’d only let me –“

“Who’s a-henderin’ you?  Don’t you insinuate nothin’ agin me! – don’t you do it.  Don’t you come in here bullyin’ around, and cussin’ and goin’ on like a lunatic – don’t you do it.  ‘Coz I won’t stand it.  If fight’s what you want, out with it!  I’m your man!  Out with it!”

It walks the line, but Arkansas is still perfectly understandable and his voice is clear in the reader’s head.

When writing dialogue using colloquialisms or dialect, you still need to follow the rules.  What many writers don’t realize is that it needn’t be written the way people actually talk.  This is never truer than for dialect; the idea is to suggest a regional or cultural flavor in speech.  If your character has a Southern accent, for example, you don’t have to write this:

“Well hay-ell, Honey, you-awl don’ need ta put yaselves ahwt on mah account.”

when this will do:

“Well hell Honey, y’all don’t need to put yourselves out on my account.”

Y’all is familiar Southern speak. It lets us know a bit about the speaker’s regional origins.  He could be from Georgia or Texas or somewhere else below the Mason-Dixon Line, but we know it as soon as he opens his mouth.  Or if you’re writing a mystery, his right-on-the-money phony accent completes his disguise and conceals his sinister intent.  If you combine the cultural elements with other traits consistent with the character’s personality and upbringing, you can achieve your local color without straining your readers’ eyes.

Stay away from stereotypes.  Not all Southerners are polite and not all New Yorkers talk fast or broaden their A’s. Stereotypes cheapen your characters; they should have traits that are uniquely theirs, including their speech.  In Stephen King’s latest novel Under the Dome, the power-mad second councilman refers to people he doesn’t like or respect as “cottonpickers.”  It’s a tag that is peculiar to him and tells a lot about his personality.  (By the way, read that book.  SK is in fine form and I couldn’t put it down.  I hope I learn how to build tension that well someday.)

Read as much as you can. Pay attention to other writers’ dialogue.  See what works for you and what doesn’t.  If you’ve noticed a stellar example of dialect and colloquialism in fiction, or a terrible one, tell us about it in the comments.

Ah, the New Year.  A time to start over, to make promises to ourselves we may or may not keep, to beat our heads against the blank page of a new project.

I like to call this state of being before the outline is completed “stuckityness.”  (So it’s not really a word; shut up, Spellchecker.  I meant to type that.)  I’m always stuck at first; it takes time to get into the mindset of a new world and wrap my thoughts in the fog of a new set of characters.  In order to do that, I have to eliminate distractions.  You know what they are.

• The TV.  When I’m working it’s usually on but muted, because for some reason I can concentrate better if I have something to ignore.  I’m sure that comes from multitasking at work.  Receptionists and admins rarely get the luxury of closing an office door.

Usually I listen to music while writing, but since the TV is on all the time when I’m home, things just don’t seem quite right when it’s not.  But I park it on a rerun-heavy channel like Nick at Nite, so I don’t get distracted by a hot guy or exciting reenactment.

• The Internet.  This is so hard for me; I love the Internet. I’m on it all the time.  If I can’t get online, I freak as though I’ve lost a limb.  God forbid I can’t get my email, read Cracked.com or Consumerist, or message my peeps. The Web brings its own set of distractions, especially chat and videos. One feeds off the other and there goes three hours or more.

I set a limit of 45 minutes to an hour to surf and check all the sites I regularly haunt.  Then I must work for at least two hours before I can go back online, even to look something up.  When it’s going well, I often work longer.  Chat is limited to a quick greeting and a check back at the end of the session.

• The phone.  It never fails; as soon as I sit down with my laptop and headphones, someone calls me. I just have to remember to bring the cordless handset with me in case a call is a welcome respite.  I hate getting up once I’m settled.

I can and do ignore the phone, so I tell people to leave a message. I usually check it and call back the first time I get up to take a break.

• Neighbors or solicitors banging on the door.  I can’t do much about the former, but I dealt with the latter by posting a sign that says “NO SOLICITORS; NO PROSELYTIZING; NO LEAFLETS; NOW GET OFF MY LAWN.”

A guy knocked earlier this fall and said “I know you mean it on your sign, but I was wondering if I could pick up your brush pile for $5.”  Hell, yes.  That’s a great deal.  Just keep the candy, magazines and preaching far, far away.  I don’t need any of that.

Discipline is the watchword.  Without it, no book would ever be written because it takes time and effort to do it. If you want to write, you have to realize that it is work and you are the boss.  No one will make you sit your tookus in the chair and do it except you.

What tactics do you use to eliminate distractions? Tell us about it in the comments.