Been a while since I posted some personal thoughts on the writing process but, as I’m not elbow deep in the 7th Draft of my latest Corrosive Knights novel, I realized it was a good time to go into at least one very important -perhaps THE most important!- element in writing:

Be concise.

Make every word, sentence, paragraph, and chapter count.  Trim the fat and, even more importantly, be on the lookout for it.

Authors are like any other people: You’re -quite understandably- proud of things you can do.  This goes for things you do on your job to things you do in your free time and can take the form of many things.  Whether it be cooking a meal, cleaning your home, setting tile, building a dog/tree house, running a personal best mile, etc. etc. etc. one takes pride in one’s accomplishments and creative writing, in my case specifically, is what I absolutely live for.

I love the act of writing a book, even when its a freaking pain in my ass and things don’t seem to be quite right and it takes too long to get through a certain section or you bemoan all the time spent before your computer or reading through the printouts.

The satisfaction comes at the end, when you know you’ve done your best and created something you’re proud of and, even more importantly, you’re certain its something others will enjoy.

But here’s the thing: You can’t fall too much in love with your work and get to a point where you’re blinded to potential weaknesses.

When I was elbow deep in Draft #6 of the book, there was a section in it toward the beginning that, frankly, wasn’t all that exciting to read through.  I would go even so far as to say I found it something of a chore to read.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, figuring I was either exhausted (as I frequently am… I fear sometimes I work myself a little too hard even as another part of my mind berates me for not working hard enough!) or too concerned with other sections of the book that needed work or… whatever.

So here I was yesterday in Draft #7 of the book and I get to that same part and… its boring me.

Again.

This time around I put the draft down and decide to take a bathroom break.  As I do so, I think about that section of the book (a chapter, really), and recall my similar feelings when I read that particular section a while back.

I have sudden, blinding insight and realize, perhaps one draft too later (but better late than never!) that if I’m feeling bored reading this particular chapter, and its my own freaking work, then how will others react to it?

So I think some more.  The chapter is important to the story so eliminating it entirely is out of the question.  No, I realized, there was a need to take another careful look at it and read it yet again and try to see why it wasn’t working.

Though I was past that chapter, I returned to it, resolved to unlock this mystery.

With that mindset, I realized the chapter had more bloat than others.  I simply went into too much description of things that ultimately didn’t matter all that much to the story, even though the events in the particular chapter were important to the overall novel.

And I became a surgeon and carefully went over the chapter line by line by line and cut all the things that were not necessary while keeping all the things that were.  In the end, I suspect the first half of this chapter will be roughly half the length it originally was, but readers will move through this chapter much quicker and the points I was trying to make will be made that much faster.

The late author Elmore Leonard had a fascinating list of 10 Creative Writing Do’s and Don’ts (you can read the full list here).  My favorite bit of advice is his very last point:

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.  My most important rule is one that sums (this) up: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

I love that first line: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.  In other words, when writing a novel or story of any kind, the author should try their best to keep the stuff people want to read and remove/delete/eliminate the stuff they don’t want to read.

Sounds simple but, of course, it isn’t quite so simple.  For six drafts I had a chapter in my latest book which bothered me yet, dense as I am, didn’t see it for what it was: Bloated.  It was only on the 7th pass that I recognized there was a problem and addressed it.

This is why I work through as many drafts of my novels as I do and take great pains to make sure they’re released when they’re ready.  While it may take a reader a day or two to read one of my novels, it takes me of late two full years to write these works.  But that’s the time needed and that’s the time it takes.

The last thing I want to do is write something that bores people… especially me!  😉