Hello, writers. Write On! turns three years old this week. Originally I had meant to keep it going for a few months, till I ran out of things to say about writing. Well, I ran out of things to say ages ago, but other people still have a lot to say, so here we are.
Some of you have been here from the beginning, others just a few weeks, and a lot of people seem to wander in for a week or two or three and then wander away again, presumably to write. Anyway, it’s a delight to have everyone—the published, the unpublished, and the good-sized proportion of y’all about whom I wonder why the %$^& isn’t s/he published?
It reminds me of something that Teh Guru said to me over lunch some time in the balmy summer of 2000.
“Sensible,” he said, “I have the impression that you are not sending anything out.”
“Well, I guess not,” I said.
“Nobody ever sold a manuscript that was sitting in a desk drawer,” he said.
And I say the same to you, only with hard drive substituted for desk drawer.
Btw, I did as Teh Guru advised. And I started getting rejections. Impersonal form rejections. Personalized rejections that said “this was almost good; send something else”. Personalized rejections that said “you can’t write; stop trying”. I even got the infamous Gardner Dozois form rejection that accused all and sundry of not knowing the basic rules of English grammar. So I can definitely see the advantages to not sending stuff out. But then, one day…
Anyway, in the fine tradition of making New Year’s resolutions for other people, this is mine for you:
Send stuff out.
Now, in preparation for the eventual result of this—getting an editor-- tonight’s challenge is going to involve Cutting.
Editors usually want you to cut. Today’s prose, as you know Bob, is generally required to be lean. So once you have polished your manuscript to Jewel of Togwogmagog-like brightness, so that every sentence is perfect, you can expect an editor to ask you to chop those perfect sentences like salami.
Tonight’s challenge:
Here is a 344-word selection, dating from 1915. Cut it to 150 words or less. (You can also add words if you want, but the end result should be 150 words max.)
"I am inclined to think -- " said I.
"I should do so," Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.
I believe that I am one of the most long-suffering of mortals; but I'll admit that I was annoyed at the sardonic interruption.
"Really, Holmes," said I severely, "you are a little trying at times."
He was too much absorbed with his own thoughts to give any immediate answer to my remonstrance. He leaned upon his hand, with his untasted breakfast before him, and he stared at the slip of paper which he had just drawn from its envelope. Then he took the envelope itself, held it up to the light, and very carefully studied both the exterior and the flap.
"It is Porlock's writing," said he thoughtfully. "I can hardly doubt that it is Porlock's writing, though I have seen it only twice before. The Greek e with the peculiar top flourish is distinctive. But if it is Porlock, then it must be something of the very first importance.”
He was speaking to himself rather than to me; but my vexation disappeared in the interest which the words awakened.
"Who then is Porlock?" I asked.
"Porlock, Watson, is a nom-de-plume, a mere identification mark; but behind it lies a shifty and evasive personality. In a former letter he frankly informed me that the name was not his own, and defied me ever to trace him among the teeming millions of this great city. Porlock is important, not for himself, but for the great man with whom he is in touch. Picture to yourself the pilot fish with the shark, the jackal with the lion – anything that is insignificant in companionship with what is formidable: not only formidable, Watson, but sinister -- in the highest degree sinister. That is where he comes within my purview. You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?"
"The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as --"
"My blushes, Watson!" Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.
"I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public.”
--opening of The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle
(By the way, in selecting the above passage, I plowed through a lot of Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, and the stuff of Arthur Conan Doyle’s that Watson didn’t help him with. It seems unlikely that any of that stuff would find a publisher today. The Sherlock Holmes stories might. But they’d be regarded as needing work. Tragic? Possibly, possibly not. The world changes.)
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