Booker's Blog

REWRITING? TRY SOME “HIGHER EDITING”

By DAN POLLOCK

“Do you like Kipling?” goes the old joke. Answer: “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled.”

At age 23 Rudyard Kipling’s sensational debut was comparable to that of Charles Dickens. “The star of the hour,” aid Henry James when Rudyard was only 25. “Too clever to live,” said Robert Louis Stevenson.

But the shooting star did not flame out. While he continued to produce stories and poems at a prodigious rate, he never joined his own rabid fan club. His approach to the craft of writing remained ever that of a conscientious workman. He edited himself ruthlessly.

“Higher Editing” he called it, and I’ll get to the specifics of his technique in a few moments.

My first thriller, Lair of the Fox, was sold on the basis of an outline and the first 100 pages to a small publisher (Walker & Co). The completed manuscript weighed in at 120,000 words – every one them perfect, I’ll have you know.

But my editor informed me that, in order to reduce their printing and binding costs, Walker never published trade books over 80,000 words. Would I mind cutting 40,000 words from my manuscript? I did it — with the help of Kipling’s “Higher Editing” method. And the book is much the better for it.

DIGEST YOUR WORDS
A famous American editor had this advice: “Play ‘digester’ to your manuscript; imagine that you are an editorial assistant on a digest magazine performing a first squeeze on the article to be digested. Can you squeeze out an unnecessary hundred words from each thousand in your draft?”

Mystery writer John D. MacDonald used the reductive process as an intrinsic part of his creative plan. A magazine profile once described him “tapping out the 1,000-page drafts that he whittles down to 300-page manuscripts in four months.”

For this reductive process to work, however, you have to put your heart and soul into that first draft, like Tom Wolfe or John MacDonald. Don’t edit or second-guess yourself the first time through; let yourself be driven forward by the compelling emotion of your story; to switch metaphors, trowel on the raw pigment, which you can shape later at leisure.

To quote editor Gorham Munson, “Write as a writer, rewrite as a reader.”

THE LEONARD METHOD
Elmore Leonard went from a journeyman paperback writer (westerns and detectives) to best-sellerdom and Hollywood fame by taking an opposite tack. He began to edit himself in advance – on his first draft. As he famously put it (his rule No. 10 of good writing): “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

If you can do that, bravo! Most writers have to go back over their work and painfully cut out the deadwood.

Here is the method used by Belgian mystery master Georges Simenon:

INTERVIEWER: “What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?”

SIMENON: “Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence — cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.”

To quote Leonard again, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

HIGHER EDITING
So we come, at last, to Kipling’s “Higher Editing.” Here he describes how he used it on his debut story collection, Plain Tales From the Hills:

“This leads me to the Higher Editing. Take of well-ground Indian Ink as much as suffices and a camel-hair brush proportionate to the interspaces of your lines. In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider
faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible.

“At the end of that time, re-read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and ‘when thou hast done, repent not’…. The magic lies in the Brush and the Ink.”

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Dan Pollock is the author of four thriller novels: Lair of the Fox, Duel of Assassins, Orinoco,and a specially commissioned “logistics” thriller, Precipice. He and his wife, Connie, a writer-editor, live in Southern California with their two children. You’ll find his blog at: http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=O8uEK&m=IhM0eF8OM_LsQz&b=kuZLqdii5DpvdVIbrBuqlw

[Editor’s note: This entry comes courtesy of Bruce Hale. Bruce has written and illustrated over 25 books for kids. His Underwhere series includes Prince of Underwhere and Pirates of Underwhere. His Chet Gecko Mysteries series includes: The Chameleon Wore Chartreuse, The Big Nap, The Malted Falcon, Hiss Me Deadly, and others. More at http://www.brucehale.com/]