Wikimedia (color edited by Clio2)
Good evening, fellow scribes!
Hope you've been having a good week.
Once again I volunteered to host, though hardly qualified to lecture before this cabal of accomplished writers.
In the spirit of "write what you know," the topic tonight is one of the handful of tricks I do know, and so do you, but a reminder never hurts. Nor extra practice.
So, very much back to basics: cutting and compression.
White and Strunk's famous First Commandment was, of course, "Omit needless words."
One journalistic beat I covered, years ago now, required summarizing reports of government investigations into fatal workplace incidents. Unbelievably -- in retrospect -- I averaged about 50 of these stories per year, for more than 12 years altogether. An estimated total of roughly 600. Give or take.
A few of these pieces concerned major disasters, the kind that made national news. Most, however, would be considered "routine" (by anyone not involved in the tragedy). Those items had a strict length limit.
In all the "routine" fatality articles, I also maintained a private ambition: to tell a story subscribers would want to read to the end, and that would cause those readers to feel something. To care.
Given the nature of the publisher's business, this ambition was tightly circumscribed: by "straight" journalistic forms and standards; by reliance on a dry, technical report, plus other publicly available facts; and by space. An exacting discipline that I believe made me a better writer.
You were of course forbidden to use emotive language, editorialize, or imagine missing details. On the other hand, you could choose strong, objective nouns and verbs. You could place your facts, your clauses, your individual words in an order that flows. You could juxtapose facts in a way that would make readers think, yet leave the readers to draw their own conclusions. And you could compress, compress, compress.
That might mean locating not just words but clauses and sentences, even facts sometimes, that could go. Or be tightened.
At times I'd have to word-count the draft repeatedly, often starting from something as discouraging as, "OMG 264 words over limit!" to, "Well, only 50 now," down to 14, 12, 4....until, maybe, "One more word has to be cut, and OMG how????"
Perhaps, in its context, for example, "He walked to the other side and..." could become "Walking to the other side, he..." And there is your one-word cut.
(Thanks to our particular word-count software, just finding a shorter word could also work, now and then!)
Over and over, I found that the rigid demand to cut, compress, shrink, boil down, improved the story. And sometimes uncovered creative paths through the narrative and analysis, too.
The process might be frustatring at times, but I also found it mildy addictive -- like crosswords.
💀 SIDE RANT: Effective cutting requires sensitivity to story, language, and the mental process of prospective readers.
AI cannot do this shit, and never will. 💀
First draft of several rings sand-cast in silver. Initial step is to cut off the "sprue" representing the passageway through which the metal filled the mold. The remnant of this has to be filed off by hand, a tedious task. The dull coating is removed by "pickling" in an acid solution. All this before final polish. Borrowed from www.danaarts.com/...(very informative site), cropped and color-edited by Clio2.
"Good tailoring is labour lost if the cloth is ill shrunk." Deliberate shrinking of course makes woven wool, cotton or linen denser and sturdier, helps it hold its shape, and makes it resistant to further shrinkage. (Wikipedia)
Distillation makes it more potent. (Wikimedia)
"
Slack air becomes an urgent force. (Vintage ad, for sale here: www.ebay.com/...)
Comparing vintage with contemporary writers, expectations around compression and narrative speed have grown exponentially. Sighs for Dickens's era when writers were paid by the word! ;-)
So, here's a set of exercises, all based on a vintage volume from our public library's giveaway shelf: E. Phillips Oppenheim, Miss Brown of X.Y.O. (Ch. III, pp. 24 f.) New York: A.L. Burt Co. (by arrangement with Little, Brown and Co.), 1927.
Almost forgotten now, Oppenheim was a prolific and popular writer of suspense novels.
In the first two chapters, our protag -- a freelance London stenographer -- is hired on an evening of dense fog to record a lengthy statement from a dying man. Her employer instructs her secretly to deliver the document next morning to a certain employee at a certain bank. This task is claimed to be of national importance. He also gives her a gun. Here's the opening of the third chapter.
(In the extract, there are a couple of minor cuts to avoid any confusion from the lack of full context.)
"The Shadow" (borrowed from Angmar, cropped by Clio2)
Miss Brown, though securely established
in her bed-sitting room, spent an uneasy night. Once or twice she woke with a start and listened. An approaching footstep which paused beneath her window brought her left hand to the precious packet under her pillow, and her right to that unfamiliar little weapon upon the table by her side. Always the footsteps passed on, however; the rumble of traffic became less distinct and the early morning stillness soothed her once more to slumber. When she awoke it was past eight o'clock and a pale gleam of unexpected sunlight was shining through the window. She lay quite still for a few minutes, realising little by little this strange thing which had happened to her. As soon as it was all there in her mind, and her brain as well as her body was fully awake, she rose, wrapped herself in a blue dressing gown, which was almost her only vanity, made her way to a room at the end of the dingy hall, deposited a coin in a meter, and enjoyed a warm bath with the packet on the shelf in front of her. Afterwards, with it still tucked under her arm, she returned to her room, lit a small gas stove, and boiled a kettle whilst she dressed. As a rule, she stepped out to the baker's adjoining for a roll, but this morning she was filled with the one consuming desire to deposit her precious volume in safety without running the slightest risk. At ten o'clock she placed it in her satchel which she carefully and elaborately strapped up after a method of her own, discarded last night's mackintosh in favor of an, alas, very cheap fur coat, unfastened the door and stepped hesitatingly out into the street. There was no one who seemed to be taking the least interest in her movements, and she hurried with beating heart along the narrow thoroughfare towards the passage leading into Curzon Street. As she neared the entrance, however, she slackened her pace. She tried to tell herself that she was developing a new trick of nervousness. Nevertheless, the apprehension had seized her that she was being followed. She was certain of it. Ahead of her there was a man loitering in front of a stationer's shop, apparently studying the row of placards. At the sound of her light footsteps he looked up and she felt his eyes travel to some one in the rear conveying a message--or was it a warning? She swung suddenly round. A man who might have been a clerk on his way to work or a small shopkeeper, an insignificant little person with a stubborn, evil expression in his pallid face, was barely a yard behind her. She stood on one side to let him pass, taking care to keep the satchel she was carrying between herself and the wall. The man at once divined that her suspicions were aroused and made a plunge forward, waving a signal at the same time to the loiterer in front. He secured the satchel, but he secured at the same time Miss Brown herself -- Miss Brown lying upon her side on the pavement, dragged almost into the gutter, with an intolerable pain in her wrist to which she had tightly strapped her precious burden before she had left her room.
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All sorts of things are wrong with this passage, from a modern writerly perspective (as we might also note in our comments), but let's start by employing it as raw material.
Three challenge options:
1. Puzzle play: copy and paste the passage into a draft comment. Then see how much you can shrink it, without losing anything crucial. (Not limited to simple word edits. Moving things around is fine, interpreting what isn't clear is fine, and some details might go.) Perfection isn't the goal, just betterment.
OR
2. Reframe the passage in your own words and style. Change any parameters you feel like, such as details, mood, POV, or ending. Resolve the incident, or not, as desired. But shrink it, net.
OR
3. You're a Hollywood rewrite specialist! Go to town! Anything works that's even vaguely "inspired by" the source. Still shorten. Transom alligators optional, naturally. ;-)
No stress, whichever you choose, just have a nice time with it, please!
Suspense writer's creed!