My college writing students blink at the “red” on their papers.
No, it isn’t the ink color (I always edit in green). It is the abbreviation for “redundant,” and it demands omission.
Last Wednesday, I blogged about being cut. A top agent had passed on my middle grade manuscript – “for now” – with a list of practical suggestions. In essence, I was the cut-ee.
This was karma, because mostly, I am the cutter. I draw green lines through my students’, private clients’, and the Lithia girls’ words, paragraphs, pages, or – ouch! – entire chapters.
It even extends to leisure reading. I would have shaved off the last 151 pages from Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. There was something so visual, so tight and (ironically) clean, about the women sloshing through mud and mosquitoes on their exodus from Africa. It was satisfying enough – without having the next 25 years plotted out and crammed in the conclusion.
I would have nixed the first few chapters of the 2008 Printz Award-winning The White Darkness. Those extra 3,000 words derailed the reader’s interest, and, frankly, were irrelevant.
At the 2007 Big Sur Children’s Writing Conference, Nancy Lamb, author of The Writer’s Guide to Crafting Stories for Children, gave it to us straight: “If it doesn’t move the story forward, it goes out.”
Thank you, Nancy; more is not more. (By the way, Lamb’s literary bible is a succinct 232 pages.)
Before you submit your work, ready your “red.” You may be among the writers who win contests, who get agents, who publish, not for what they wrote, but for what they didn’t write.
No, it isn’t the ink color (I always edit in green). It is the abbreviation for “redundant,” and it demands omission.
Last Wednesday, I blogged about being cut. A top agent had passed on my middle grade manuscript – “for now” – with a list of practical suggestions. In essence, I was the cut-ee.
This was karma, because mostly, I am the cutter. I draw green lines through my students’, private clients’, and the Lithia girls’ words, paragraphs, pages, or – ouch! – entire chapters.
It even extends to leisure reading. I would have shaved off the last 151 pages from Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. There was something so visual, so tight and (ironically) clean, about the women sloshing through mud and mosquitoes on their exodus from Africa. It was satisfying enough – without having the next 25 years plotted out and crammed in the conclusion.
I would have nixed the first few chapters of the 2008 Printz Award-winning The White Darkness. Those extra 3,000 words derailed the reader’s interest, and, frankly, were irrelevant.
At the 2007 Big Sur Children’s Writing Conference, Nancy Lamb, author of The Writer’s Guide to Crafting Stories for Children, gave it to us straight: “If it doesn’t move the story forward, it goes out.”
Thank you, Nancy; more is not more. (By the way, Lamb’s literary bible is a succinct 232 pages.)
Before you submit your work, ready your “red.” You may be among the writers who win contests, who get agents, who publish, not for what they wrote, but for what they didn’t write.
1 comment:
As someone who has been on the receiving end of the wrath of your green pen - THANKS! My work is always better after it's been green lined...
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