Writers and Natural Talent: More About that MFA essay

Some writers don’t rewrite; others do. I’m among the latter – by the time a story goes out, it’s passed beneath my eyes at least four or five times, often significantly more, and at least one of those passes has been a read-aloud. If that’s not your style, perhaps you’ll prefer this story prompt, this post on three things that end a story well, or the always popular Rambo Cat. If you’re with me in a preference for the polished, though, here’s some techniques for fine-tuning prose.

Towards the end of working on something, you often get weary. You’ve looked at that sentence so many times it’s become meaningless. Perhaps you reach the point of the final polish and think, “Well, it’s good enough already.” It’s not. Give it one last gloss, one last rub of the magic word-rag to bring its surface up to such a mirror-bright sheen that the editor can see their humanity reflected in it.

Talking to a friend, I compared this to going over each paragraph looking for zits, words or phrases that are little ugly clots marring the sentence. Groom the prose like a show pony, trimming dead-ends of lifeless conjunctions or combing sentences into parallel structure in order to bring them to a glossy shine.

1. Remove adverbs. An effective way to find instances of adverbs is to search on “ly” via your word processor. Nine times out of ten, if not more, the adverb’s a signal that a better verb is needed: “dashed” instead of “ran quickly” or “shouted” rather than “said loudly”. Find that verb and snip off that lumpy adverb.

2. Too long sentences (and paragraphs). Split up long sentences, whose meaning may waver and transform somewhere between the first word and the last. You want varied sentence construction, a mix of long and short, unless you’re trying for a deliberate effect by sticking to one or the other. This level of pass is a good place to get out the shears and cut through a few conjunctions.

3. Cliche comparisons and figures of speech. Watch for tired phrases and spend a moment to come up with something fresher. Use a random tool to spark ideas if you need to. Liven things up.

4. And then. Look at the beginnings of sentences to see if their first words are necessary. “And” and “Then” are common ways to begin a sentence that are usually unnecessary. Those words should only begin sentences if they’re needed for pacing. Otherwise, they’re extraneous.

5. Bad sentence constructions. It’s easy, with long sentences, to get confused and a touch ungrammatical. It’s okay to break the rules of grammar but make sure it’s deliberate and not accidental.

Now put away your sandpaper and blow gently on your paragraphs. Part of the process is letting the words rest for a little while. Now’s the time to do that. Go out into the sunlight or evening, leaving your writing behind locked safely in drawer or computer file – steeping, aging, mellowing until you’re ready to look at it again.

One of the things I stress to students is that you cannot wait for the muse. And, in fact, the more you wait for her, the less likely she is to arrive.

For example. The last few days I’ve been working at getting back into the flow of writing daily. I held myself accountable and post daily word counts here or on Twitter. And lemme tell you, some of those words were difficult to wrestle out of my skull and onto the page. One way I can tell things are going in difficult fits and spurts is that I’ll hop around a lot from story to story.

One of those projects is “Prairiedog Town” (which is definitely getting a different title). I started jotting down mental notes for it while traveling through Kansas, but only had a thousand words or so on it before last week. It was slow writing, partially because I wasn’t sure how I was getting from one point to another in the story. I knew it was a piece about a woman reclaiming her humanity and I had a good idea of what the penultimate scene would look like.

So I kept jotting words down in sporadic clumps of a few hundred at a time, yerking the story along in an awkward and impatient way. It helped when I incorporated a prompt from Sandra M. Odell, a woman finding an abandoned teddy bear by the road. But it still was slow slogging. Yesterday I took a break from it.

And then, this morning, while working on it, things began to fall into place. A secondary character had popped up, and I understood how to bring her back into the story — and why. A piece that was supposed to take three days suddenly shortened into a single night, and with that, the ultimate scene came clear. I went through, pulling the threads into place as close to a thousand words came spilling out and into the story.

It’s not done yet — maybe another thousand words to go, but I’ve got a map of it, and comments where I need to go back and insert things. Here, for example, is what a section of today’s work looks like:

They end up chatting. Talia asks after father. Relates that he’s died. Talia asks if she’s going to the funeral.

No
It’s what you’d say either way, isn’t it.
That’s true
I’ll be there. On the outskirts.

She freezes again. It’s an old code word they used to use, back in the days when they worked together. It’s someplace close but (some distance) to the (direction).

And most importantly at all, things have come together to a point where I’m excited about the story, feel that some clever stuff has been worked in or has had places made for it. It’ll end up being around 4-5 thousand words, and I know I’ll finish it by the end of this month, because it’s designated as the next story to go out in the Patreon campaign.

And if I hadn’t done that picking away at it — scraping those words out of my skull, even though it felt painful and awkward and uninspired — I would have never gotten to that point at all.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.