Stein on Writing (35 page)

The motivation of important deeds is not an option but a necessity. Writers of so-called commercial fiction often rely on coincidence. They assume their readers suspend disbelief more readily than the readers of literary fiction. Motivating actions takes work, and using coincidence is
much easier. But coincidence is the mark of transient works, and I have met few novelists who are satisfied to think of their work as merely temporary entertainment.

After you’ve dealt with the three main actions of the book, the next step is to review any other significant actions, ferreting out poor motivation and anything that might seem to happen just because the author wants it to. Is there any action in your manuscript that is not in keeping with the character? Is there any action that under examination sounds far-fetched? It might be fixed by planting a motive in a prior scene. Do this before undertaking a general revision so that you can judge the success of your revision as you read through from beginning to end.

Until testing motivation comes easily, I suggest rereading Chapter 15. That will help anchor in your mind the means of establishing credibility. The examples in that chapter will help remind you that motivation can often be derived from something simple.

You are almost ready to undertake a general revision of the entire manuscript. Take the first page and put the rest aside out of sight. Next do something else. Anything else. Take a walk. Take a drive. Play tennis or golf. Visit a neighbor. Make a cup of coffee. Whatever you do, try not to think about your manuscript. Then come back and make a new title page that looks like this:

Your Present Title

by

[Insert the Name of a Contemporary Author You Admire]

Now read the first page as if it were the other author’s manuscript. After reading the first page, would you go on to the next page?

If there isn’t a compelling reason to go to page two, it usually means that you haven’t sparked the reader’s curiosity. If that’s the case, you need to go back to Chapter 2 of this book and see if you can use its guidelines to improve your opening.

Of course, if your first page as presently written compels you to read on, congratulations! You are ready to begin the general revision of your manuscript that I’ve kept you from by suggesting all of these other steps first.

* * *

Embarking on a general revision calls for starting on page one and working through the manuscript to the end, reading as a reader and an editor, not as a writer. If you’re not used to the process, and if the fun we had with the title page didn’t give you enough distance, try to think of the manuscript this way: It was recommended to you by a friend, but you doubt the friend’s judgment. He or she has previously recommended books you found wanting. Maybe this manuscript will turn out to be the same. You are going to read it critically, like a tough editor.

Before you begin, I want to caution you not to disimprove what is there.
If in doubt about a change, don’t make the change.
Instead, make a note to yourself for later consideration. I find that when I look at such notes days or weeks later, many of those questionable ideas for revision get discarded.

Your first objective in a general revision is to tighten the manuscript. I know of only one novelist who writes tight first drafts that need expanding in revision. The others need cutting, lots of it. It is perfectly normal to overwrite in first drafts. The test of a writer’s skill is in recognizing on later reading what can be eliminated, and then having the guts to do the cutting.

One of the students in my advanced fiction seminar had a manuscript acceptable to his agent but not to him. He knew it was too long. He took advantage of his computer. Every time he came to a paragraph he wasn’t sure contributed to the book, he marked it and with a block move transferred it to the end, after the last page. When he finished he found that he had transferred dozens of paragraphs and that only one or two, in modified form, deserved a place in the text. It’s a useful strategy. I’ve tried it and it works.

Your second objective is to watch out for the between-the-scenes material, especially the offstage recounting of actions not seen. Try to eliminate as many of these as you can, or make them active and interesting in themselves. If this needs clarification, reread Chapter 3.

If you’re not used to extensive revision, you may feel as if you’re trying to do too many things at once. I want to assure you that over time you will be able to do it. In the meantime, do as many as you can and then go back over the manuscript for the others. Remember, I am trying to keep you from growing “cold” by keeping down the number of your reviews of your work.

In your general revision, cut words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs, pages, or whole scenes that seem not absolutely necessary. Watch for
places where your own attention flags. That’s usually a sign that something needs to be revised or cut.

If your sentences are all approximately the same length, the effect will be monotonous. Vary the length of sentences. Ideally, follow an especially long sentence with a short, even abrupt sentence. Don’t do this all the time. A pattern of short-long-short-long can get almost as monotonous as all long or all short sentences. One of my students writes naturally in a mellifluous cadence. It’s her greatest fault. An unbroken mellifluous cadence, lovely for a few sentences, if kept up will put a reader to sleep.

Unless you are consciously trying to slow things down between fast-moving scenes, be relentless in moving the story forward. If you find it bogging down at any point, it could be for many reasons: perhaps too slow a pace, not enough happening. If you don’t see an immediate fix, mark the place in the margin and write down what you think might be wrong. Come back to those places later.

If you catch the author talking at any point, or a mix of points of view, mark the section so that you can return to Chapter 13 for guidance.

Are your characters under stress from time to time? Does the stress increase? Keep reminding yourself that fiction deals with the most stressful moments of the characters’ lives.

As you go through, cut every unessential adjective and adverb. Cut “very.” Cut “poor” for everything but poverty. Make every word count.

If you’ve said the same thing twice in different words, pick the better one and cut the other. If you find yourself using the same uncommon word twice within a few pages, use your thesaurus to pick a synonym. And in your read-through, mark every cliché for excision.

One of the most common improvements I find in line-editing a writer’s manuscript is changing the order of words, phrases, or independent clauses in a sentence. The simplest instance is where you put the identification of who is speaking. Do you write,

George said, “They treating you okay?”

Or:

“They treating you okay?” George said.

If there is any chance that the reader won’t know who is speaking at that point, the “George said” should come first. If it is clear who is speaking, “George said” can follow what he says or be omitted.

In my own work, I make transpositions hundreds of times in a book-length manuscript. Sometimes it is to let the emphasis of a sentence fall in a different place. Here’s an unedited sentence:

Josephine Japhet of course knew why her son was a reader in a universe of listeners to rock music.

That puts the emphasis on rock music. I transposed the phrase “her son was a reader” to the end of the sentence, since that was where I wanted the emphasis to fall:

Josephine Japhet of course knew why, in a universe of listeners to rock music, her son was a reader.

In another scene, Ed Japhet is in school, outside the room where his father has just finished teaching and is trying to get away from a student pestering him with questions after class. Ed shows his impatience this way:

Your old man teaching in your school was bad enough. Depending on him for a ride home was the pits.
Come on, Dad, move it.

The thought was improved by transposing the last of the three sentences to the beginning of the paragraph, so that it read:

Come on, Dad, move it.
Your old man teaching in your school was bad enough. Depending on him for a ride home was the pits.

After a fight, a boy is lying in the snow, badly hurt. See if you can spot the glitch in this sentence:

The other cop slid out of the car, knelt beside Urek, fingers feeling for a pulse in the neck.

Because readers will undoubtedly have had experience with a pulse being taken at the wrist, they may suppose that immediately on reading the word “pulse.” Immediately, they read “in the neck” and have to change their first view. That kind of glitch can momentarily disturb the reading experience. To avoid it, I simply transposed a few words:

The other cop slid out of the car, knelt beside Urek, fingers feeling the neck for a pulse.

It pays to transpose sentences for clarity. In the following example, a woman who is not always articulate, on the phone to a lawyer expresses her concern about what will happen to her if her husband is convicted:

“If Paul goes to jail, I won’t have anywhere. I can’t pay the mortgage on my own. He listens to you. Please come over.”

In my opinion, the phrase “I won’t have anywhere” is not immediately comprehensible in its present location. Transposed, it works well:

“If Paul goes to jail, I can’t pay the mortgage on my own. I won’t have anywhere. He listens to you. Please come over.”

“Purple prose” means writing that is overblown. It turns off editors and readers almost immediately. Here are some dreadful examples of purple prose:

The cry of a soul in torment, swept by a tide of anger and outrage.

Terror plucked at her taut nerves.

Jagged laughter tore at her throat.

Ghastly red spatterings, viscous red-streaked gobbets of his brains.

Fierce rending triumph.

Enough? Nobody writes that way? These are all from the bestseller
Scarlett,
Alexandra Ripley’s sequel to
Gone With the Wind.

A phrase need not be “purple” or “flowery” to be conspicuous, by which I mean that every time you pass it, it jumps off the page and pleases you. When you “love” certain images or sentences, they are frequently so conspicuous as to interfere with the story. If they are, save them in a special box that you’ll look into five years from now, and thank me for having asked you to remove them from your manuscript, though it may have hurt at the time.

Root out sentimentality, which is an excess of response to a stimulus. It makes writing “flowery.” Your job is to stimulate emotions in the
reader. An excessive response turns off the reader, just as it does people in life:

“Why Fred, I am so excited to see you I just can’t bear it.”

That kind of gushing is just as incredible in fiction as it is in life.
Underplay
to evoke emotion in the reader:

I looked at her eyes. They were dry.

Given the right context, that would evoke more emotion than something overblown like “She was ready to cry her heart out.”

As you read through, look for imprecision, when the word you used is not exactly the word you needed. Consult a dictionary. Consult a thesaurus.

Until you are in the habit of making sure that there is something visual on every page, while reviewing the draft put a small V in the lower right corner of every page that has something visual on it. This provides a discipline as you develop the experience of reading with an editor’s eye. If a page has nothing visual, mark NV and return to it later to introduce a visual element. If you have two or more consecutive pages with nothing visual, you may have a larger problem that needs remedying, perhaps too much narrative summary where an immediate scene is needed.

In dialogue sequences, if your characters usually speak in complete sentences, fix it so they don’t. Have you used enough dialogue? Remember that one of the virtues of dialogue is that it makes scenes visible. If your dialogue sufficiently confrontational? If any dialogue runs longer than three sentences, break it up with an interjection from another character or a thought or action. Check to see that responses in dialogue are oblique, at least from time to time. If any exchange of dialogue seems weak or wrong in comparison to other dialogue exchanges, mark it for later improvement or excision.

In your general revision, catch the places where a character “muttered,” “screamed,” and the like instead of “said.” Substitute “he said” and “she said” for language that tells the reader how the lines are spoken. That’s the dialogue’s job.

Can you now see why I suggested you perform triage on major matters before your general read-through? If you are new to the process, you’ll want to make a checklist of all the things I’ve suggested catching during general revision. If you find that you just can’t do everything in
one pass, save some things for a second pass later on. In time, if you do a good job of triage, you’ll be able to handle most remaining matters in one reading.