Ten Signs that You Should Scrap that Piece of Writing

Caroline Hagood gives sage advice on when to scrap a piece of writing. Among the highlights:

1. If it needs explanation, apology, or perverse amounts of liquor to be enjoyed.

6. If it came to you in a dream, on acid, on a spiritual retreat, or on the toilet

8. If you think it could best be described as “Proustian.”

Follow the link above to the whole thing.

It’s a useful skill, to be able to strike the balance between being over-critical and not critical enough. Although when I hear about some great writers, and how they obsess over every word, I think that most of us probably don’t have either the patience or the skill for that level of polishing.

I do think it’s something that I can work on, and having a good editor can be a huge help in learning what to improve, and also just in getting a second pair of eyes to help catch things you didn’t see. I’m sure there’s some exceedingly rare unusually gifted people out there with the ability to churn out exceptional prose at will, but I know I’m not one of those.

I prefer to imagine my writing as starting with a block of marble/wood, and chipping away at it slowly, refining a piece until it’s recognizable as some sort of sculpture. What the final result is usually depends on a combination of what the piece is for, how much time I have to work on it, and what kind of feedback I get from an editor. And I do enjoy that process 🙂

I was thinking of that when I heard above Vladimir Nabokov’s lost book, the one he never finished and wanted destroyed, The Original of Laura. Nabokov’s language is always beautiful, and he also had a reputation for obsessing over it until he deemed it perfect. So reading the Original of Laura must be a little weird, sort of like seeing Michelangelo’s David in mid-construction.

What’s interesting with the version of the book I saw was that it had copies of the actual cards that Nabokov wrote the novel on, so that you could see the words he crossed out, the changes he made. When I glanced through the book at Barnes & Nobles, it seemed like the sort that Nabokov scholars would love to have, to try to analyze his thought processes for the edits his made. I still would rather have the finished novel, after all its changes; personally, I don’t think seeing Nabokov’s edits bring me any closer to understanding his thought processes, not unless he was actually around to bother explain them.

Assuming everything can be explained, of course; maybe a word just ‘felt’ right. I don’t think there’s necessarily a good way to explain that. 🙂