You Put the Comma In, You Take the Comma Out...

Bonus points to anyone who read the title of this post to the tune of “The Hokey Pokey.”

Anyway, the inspiration for this post comes from the brilliant Oscar Wilde, whose The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of my all-time favorite books:

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

I guess Oscar just must’ve been having one of those days.  Don’t we all?

I tend to have these moments more along the way than in final editing—I get all OCD with the minor wording, and my backspace button probably hates me for being a slave driver.  (When I go old-school and write by hand, I usually end up with at least 25% of the lines marked out.  If my laptop’s backspace button probably hates me, trees definitely do.)

The OCD approach saves me a little time in the long run—less editing to do later on—but also kills some of my effort when revisions set in and scenes get slashed.  I’d consider trying to reign in the internal editor for a bit, since that seems like the wise thing to do, but I’ve never been wise and I’d rather just stick with my writing flow, idiosyncrasies and all.  Which begs the question.

Have you ever had one of those days, full of scribbled lines or extra bonding time with your backspace button?  Which describes you—“obsessive-compulsive” corrector or “I locked my internal editor in the closet (gagged and bound)” kidnapper?

Rewriting: It's Kind of a Love/Hate Situation

Well, I'm still very much in the clutches of rewrites.  

    Yeah, I have been for a while now.  And to be honest, I haven't been working on them as much as I should've for most of June. 

    But it's July now.

    So I'm pulling myself out of this whole "writer's drought" issue and getting the rewrites done.  I've actually got most of the drudge work done, and now it's actually entering it all into my computer and then bridging the scenes together.  Since I've done a ton of rewriting on this book (it's changed a lot throughout its almost-three-year-lifespan), I've pretty much got my method down.  It goes something like this:

    First, I printed the manuscript out.  Slasher -- my neon-pink editing pen, which miraculously hasn't run out of ink -- and I got to spend lots of bonding time, since I need to cut at least 27,000 words from the book.  Ideally, I'll cut more (which looks like it's going to be easy enough) so I can go back and bridge the scenes.  More on that below. 

    When I'm cutting words for an overhaul on this scale, I have to look at each individual word, the sentence it goes with, and the paragraph it's part of.  If it doesn't have to be there
-- if it doesn't bring something incredibly important to the story -- it bites the dust. 

    In some chapters, there's more to be scrapped than there is to save.  When that's the case, I go through and highlight anything worth keeping.  I'll type up all the rest of the edits directly into a document -- there's not enough of the original document left to bother with --, but I'll completely rewrite any chapter I used the highlighting method with.  Since I had to pick out threads of paragraphs that could stay, there won't be enough left to salvage anyway.

    After I arrange all the chapters in the right places, including the rewrites, I can go through and bridge everything together.  I'd cut out plenty of extra words in the first stage, so now I can go through and add some, making transitions smoother and reinserting some of my details.  I can't go crazy, of course, but the bridge work makes the writing seem natural again, taking away the stilted sound that the bare-bones version has. 

    The biggest thing in cutting out words, for me, is that "What does it add to the story?" question.  In this way, I find that lots of things, from words to paragraphs and even whole scenes, can be removed.  For example, towards the middle, my MC gets generally broken.  Another character heals her, but the main thing is that MC gets broken, then healed.  By establishing that, I can go back and cut out chunks of details about the healing process, probably even have my MC unconscious or something for most of it.  I actually had lots of little moments like this, where I'd written in unimportant pieces instead of just hitting the main idea. 

    After it's all "done," I can make a draft specifically targeting speaker tags.  Like I've mentioned before, I used to have a huge problem with tags other than "said," and I'm still working on that.  I'll go through and check all the tags and beats.  I'll read through it one more time to see if I can catch anything else, make sure it makes sense, and then I'll have people proof-read it for me. 

    For general editing, I listed some tips here.  Have you ever had to completely rewrite something?  If so, any method you'd like to share? 

Speaker Tags: Like the Plague

Semi-recently, I stumbled upon the first draft I'd ever written.  I'll spare you the shameful and wince-worthy details, since there are some things you just shouldn't put people through, but among all its issues, my speaker tags were rampant.

    I'm not just talking about using tags other than "said" -- that's another post, and it has a lot of different facets.  (Though I had that problem, too.  When you use the word "queried" instead of ask in the attempt to change things up, you know things are bad.  But it's all in the past, right?)

   Nah, I'm talking about attaching speaking tags in general.  Especially when there's already an action tag in place.  Suzanne Collins is pretty much the queen of this -- I love The Hunger Games and its trilogy, I've made it painfully obvious and redundant in the past, but yeah.  She'll set an action tag, lay down the dialogue, and then -- no, no no.  A speaker tag.  And usually "I say" at that.  Eek.  Talk about pet peeves.

    But hey, like I said.  Suzanne Collins can do -- well, some wrong, but not a whole lot. 

    Besides avoiding my annoyance, cutting all unnecessary tags has another shining benefit: slashing the word count.  And if you're anything like me, Word Count is the enemy.  (Otherwise, you're lucky.  Word-by-word editing is a major pain.)

    Here are a couple examples of speaker tags not only done right, but kept at the barest minimum:

            Her horse was panicking; he took a deep breath and ran from cover, grabbing it by the bridle.  "Get down!"
    She jumped, and they both fell.  Then they were squirming into the bushes, lying flat, breathless.  Around them the forest roared with rain.
    "Hurt?"
    "No.  You?"
    "Bruised.  Nothing serious."
    Claudia dragged soaked hair from her eyes.  "I can't believe this.  Sia would never order it.  Where are they?"

    This is from Sapphique, by Catherine Fisher.  I think it's excellent -- there's no tag at all from the first line to the last, and even then, it's action-tagging.  She doesn't spell out who says what, and she doesn't have to -- as a reader, it really isn't rocket science to figure out. 

    Here's one more example, from A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle --

    Sandy paused, a handful of forks in his hand, to grin at their mother.  "Thanksgiving dinner is practically the only meal Mother cooks in the kitchen --"
    "--instead of out in the lab on her Bunsen burner," Dennys concluded.
    "After all, those Bunsen-burner stews did lead directly to the Nobel Prize.  We're really proud of you, Mother, although you and Father give us a heck of a lot to live up to."
    "Keeps our standards high." 

    Sure, this one uses more tags, but I still felt like it was a good example.  I'm not exactly loving the phrase "a handful of forks in his hand," but I still love how the twins are always interrupting each other, so I'll let it slide. 

    Okay, there it is.  Speaker tagging -- something better left in small doses.  What's your opinion?  Speaker tags or action tags?  I think a good mix of both is important to keep a natural-sounding balance; do you?