Tightening the Prose

Well here I've been, chugging along--and getting discouraged. I've spent a while now sending out one particular story, as y'all know. I've been fighting with this story a good long time. I've never liked the beginning; I've known from feedback that it was the weakest part of things. Yet I couldn't see my way through to how I should make it better, and for a while there, I stalled out of everything.

It has always been my tendency to "write long". My first drafts are meandering; I let my brain play with images, let myself restate things a couple times in different ways in the hopes of teasing out a gem or two that I might really like. Much like my vocal chatter, there is never a problem with not having enough! In my novel, this meandering helped me keep going through scenes, and later I got a better idea how to attack some of them. But in short stories, long is a detriment. Short stories need to be tight, close, breathing-in-your-ear kind of intense so they can distract you and suck you in quickly and keep things moving. There is no room for meandering, no room for flights of prose. I was beginning to feel like I was thrashing around, going nowhere useful. I felt like short stories were going to beat me.

And I couldn't let that happen. In my genre, getting a story or fifteen published is a good way to break in. I love my novel--and previous published stories to my name might give it a better chance. I needed to get over this short story issue. I sensed it was a big block in my writing.

Bad beginnings and writing too long--so how were these related? Where's the breakthrough?

Breakthrough there was. I took a short road trip this weekend and long periods in the car have always helped me free-associate ideas. So it came to me--a way I could cut out that pesky beginning in Areb Dar entirely, a way I could pick up at the first scene I really liked. AND I could cut out some of the chaff from later on if I could combine two other scenes and slot the substance of them in together!

Yes, this is a simple concept. Making your scene do double or even triple duty--instead of three weaker scenes, try to figure out a way to accomplish the same thing in one. Voila! Your prose tightens. Things move faster! And tension tends to rise, because you're not meandering.

This idea is discussed in many writing books and forums. But as with many things, you can understand the idea in your head and still not get it at a gut level!

I finally clicked on it yesterday. I stopped at a rest stop on the way home and scribbled notes. I woke up this morning and I began to CHOP. And to rewrite. And for the first time in a long time, it felt good to come to the page.