Oh, the carnage in a rewrite.
As writers, we all write phrases, similes, or metaphors that we find irresistible. We are in love with them. However, when we have someone read our offering and they say those certain phrases we hold dear suck, well that’s when we realize that no one else likes our attempts at cute, humor, or brilliance.
In that case, we need to slaughter them. (No, not the readers.) We need to kill those phrases, similes, or metaphors the readers find that take them out of the story. We must put our fingers on the delete key and get to work.
Yes, ouch.
Then again, you may want to keep those babies of yours because you find them to be brilliant. Remove them from the story anyway and store them elsewhere. Weeks, months, maybe years down the road, you’ll go back, re-read them, wonder why you found them to be so fantastic, and then be willing to let them die a dignified death.
We mustn’t fall so profoundly in love with our writing that we refuse to let our stories evolve.
I’m doing three different rewrites right now and you wouldn’t believe the carnage.
Posted on June 12, 2010, in My blog, My books, Writer, Writing and tagged Author, Bones, books, Books on writing, Bull Terriers, Care giving, Caregiver, Craft of writing, Dead, Disability, Doggoned, Family, Fiction, Home, Humor, Life, Love, MS, Multiple Sclerosis, Murder, Mysteries, Mystery, Novel writing, Revisions, Rewrites, Writer, Writing. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
Doggonedmysteries 
Yes, I would believe the carnage.
Sometimes, it’s not that readers don’t like our similies and metaphors or attempts a cute, funny or brilliant, it’s that we as the writer haven’t done our job and delivered phrasing, similes, metaphors, cute, funny or brilliant that work. Then it’s time to get out our tools and fix whatever needs fixing.
And, yes, it is absolutely imperative that we save everything we cut. Sometimes, later on we can find a way–change one word, rearrange the layout of a sentence, move a sentence within a paragraph–to make our beloved prose sparkle as brightly as we believed it did when we first wrote it.
And sometimes, it’s not that what we wrote doesn’t work, it’s that it doesn’t work in this particular story. But two or three stories from now, it just might be the perfect line in the perfect place.
So we cut it and save it.