This is Just to Say...

"...I have eaten the plums

that were in the icebox...

"

-- William Carlos Williams, "This is Just to Say"

Today’s Word Count for the Novel: 118,338. (1508 words removed. Prepping for this blog post motivates!)

Page Count for the novel: 440

I just decided that if I could just cut "just" from my writing it'd be just great.

I spent ten minutes the other day getting rid of "just" and saved myself 49 words. Imagine all the space I'll save by obliterating tiny excesses. And I'm only on page 161.


All writers have tics. My two favorites are "just" and "that." In my first drafts I fully explain everything, over and over, as if my audience were preschoolers and I might lose out to paste and Elmo. I also love a lot of he said, she said in my dialogue, as if the reader might not know who's talking. I call this word removal editing.

Some days editing feels like the softer side of writing, proof I'm working when my faint heart and foggy brain can't bear to convert summary to scene or can't abide killing the dialogue darlings. There's definitely a satisfaction to this easy destruction, kind of like squashing bubble wrap, when technology is your servant (the search function) and you can kill off one word, over and over, without any deep thought expended. 


Technically, editing is much, much more -- the laborious process of adherence to standard English and grammar where necessary. It's not revision, which is deep-sea diving, excavating, and lots of detonating. Revision forces you to face global concerns -- that the whole enterprise is sadly wrong or wonderfully right, that five pages right in the middle need to start page one, or that the point of view needs to be a secondary character instead of the protagonist -- decisions that make you reel. Revision is every other writing step recurring as many times as needed -- brainstorming, drafting, rewriting, repeat as needed. Editing is supposed to come after this long process of transformation: that confident and final clean-up where you put the microscope to each sentence. But then there's me, who stops and edits all the time.

The human brain loves to slice up life into a pizza pie of categories. Perhaps that's why writing as a process is now gospel truth in most every English Language Arts program. We must convert the creative act into stages, procedures, and sequences. Writing as a process does ensure kids actually spend more than ten minutes on an essay, but where we go astray is teaching each stage is discrete and part of a set, linear sequence. Editing sometimes needs to happen right after brainstorming or whenever the spirit moves you.

I read somewhere Cynthia Ozick can't move beyond the first word to the second word until the first is perfectly right. It's as if all writing stages fuse into every moment of the process. Lately when I see my excess words cluttering a first-draft sentence, I cut right away. Earlier and earlier it's starting to happen (though don't judge this blog as proof; it's only a third or fourth draft!). I like that editing has entered my first phases of composition.

But now there must be a confession. Editing can be a detour, keeping me from serious revision. I think I've accomplished something and then I fixate on the little cuts. I skip between the tweaks and removal of whole scenes, which I would call true revision. This back and forth is right now the only way I can wrap my head around this draft. 440 pages feel manageable when I prune them word by word. Maybe when I see what's left on the trunk, I can better graft some of the 300-plus deleted pages back in (now are you scared?), and only those that will take. My hope is to have 350 instead of 440 when it's time to bring the two sections together.

Those excess words are like those frozen plums William Carlos Williams coveted. They tantalize me with their sugary highs but leave cavities in my mouth, AKA little black holes in your manuscript.

But they're just so tempting!



Writing Goal: 150,000 – 170,000 words and a complete fourth draft ready by the AWP Award Series deadline. This weekend or next I will submit my essay to Hope Clark's Invisible Writing contest. I am also writing a new short story for the Stanford Magazine Fiction Contest, due November 5.

Writing Prompts: Please note that writing prompts should always be pursued in emotionally-safe environments with the supervision of someone who interested in encouraging good writing, self-awareness, and reflection. A wonderful resource is Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others.

© Lyn Hawks. Writing prompts for one-time classroom use only and not for publication in any form elsewhere without permission of this author.


Elementary Prompts

• List your five favorite words. Then start a story with one of them.

• List five words you always say, at least every day. Which one is the most important? Why? Which one could you stop saying and you wouldn't miss it?

• Finish this sentence by writing a poem or a story: "This is just to say..." or "I'm just saying..."

• Imagine that there are only 25 words left in the world to use for a story. Write a story with those 25 words. You can re-use those 25 as many times as you like and make the story as long as you like.

Secondary and Adult Prompts

• Write about writing as a process. What's your process?
• Write about your bad habits and guilty pleasures when it comes to writing.
• Finish this is sentence by writing a poem or a story: "This is just to say..." or "I'm just saying..."
• Imagine that there are only 25 words left in the world to use for a story. Write a story with those 25 words. You can re-use those 25 as many times as you like and make the story as long as you like.

Grist from Grisham, Writing Down the Bones with Reichs, and Grace with Anna Deavere Smith

At the NC Literary Festival this week, John Grisham told stories to a packed audience of how often A Time to Kill was rejected, about his long slog through libraries selling his first edition, and how fast he works to crank out a book -- sometimes less than 70 days.

Kathy Reichs of Bones fame shared how plots came to her while conducting exhumations, while investigating mass graves, while studying maggots. She spoke of dark and humorous moments reading the codes left behind by calcium. She showed how these experiences elicit questions and ideas that lead to novels.

Then a writer came to the microphone and said, "Hi, this question is for John Grisham. I began writing this year, and I think my novel has potential. If it's not too bold, I wonder if you'd look at my manuscript and perhaps share it with an agent..."

You should have heard the murmurs through Memorial Hall. Most of us squirmed, unbelieving someone had the gall. What rang in my ears was, "I began writing this year." Maybe the questioner heard Grisham's stories about working quickly and nothing else; maybe he didn't add up all the years Grisham worked so hard to reach success. Maybe the questioner figured success was easy as writing a first draft that's not even finished.

You can guess Grisham's response: how about you finish that novel first.

I've been writing since 1976 and used to think myself quite good at it, especially when I was a child and up through my thirties. But when I look back, I believe I didn't really start working at writing till the year 2000. A combination of life experiences, book projects, and a new comprehension of sweat needed for revision lifted my writing to the next level. And while I've improved, every first draft still needs time and seasoning, and always more than a face lift. I accept 10 drafts of a short story as a matter of course, the starting point, and as I chip away at the fourth draft of my novel -- or is it the fifth? -- I find part of the joy of writing is rewriting.

I don't think the guy who asked Grisham the question gets that.

I disliked him immediately for wasting our time, just as much as I disliked the person who brought the baby to tonight's performance by Anna Deavere Smith, and the college kids in front of me who couldn't keep from clicking, punching, discussing, and fondling their bright and flashing phones. Checking up on tech took precedence over hearing what Deavere Smith had to say.

Then I remembered what Anna Deavere Smith taught us tonight: the importance of grace.

In her performance, she embodies many people she's interviewed about grace and about survival -- reverends speaking to Harvard congregations, doctors stranded in a hospital during Katrina, and refugees trying to make sense of the horrors they suffered in Rwanda. She takes on personas and reads their souls to us, a storyteller with incredible compassion who can communicate a person's energy. She walked barefoot, saying that she believed in walking in others' shoes.

I believe one of a writer's greatest strengths is giving grace to each of her characters. We must do so in our daily lives, too, but since that's sometimes too hard thanks to pride and selfishness and narcissism, sometimes my only hope is to love and forgive on the page. When I refuse to reduce character to caricature (because I am not in the business of satire); when I refuse to write only for revenge (because I am not in the business of Rants R Us); when I refuse to see only with my white, female, raised upper middle class eyes -- that's when I can give some grace. I may not know another's pain firsthand, but I can try to imagine. I can try to appreciate. I can try to learn.

Anna Deavere Smith was asked how she gets people to open up in interviews. She said she was once taught three questions that will get a person talking.

Have you ever been near death?

What were the circumstances of your birth?

Have you ever been accused of something you didn't do?

Maybe I will ask my characters these questions while I write. Maybe I will think more gracefully of those who annoy me in a public forum, stumbling along just like me, awkward in a world that is impatient, loud, and as Anna Deavere Smith says, "winner take all." This is not a race toward efficiency, perfection, and fame. The world is nothing without what Studs Terkel called "the human touch."

He didn't mean iTouch. He meant looking each other in the eye and saying, "Sorry," or "I forgive you," or "Isn't that hilarious."

I was that confident greenhorn once thinking I'd not have to do too much to get my words out there. I assumed everyone wanted to hear what I wanted to say and how I said it. Now, let me give my writing the grace and space to make it worthy of consumption by others at just the right time.

That's the grist, bones, and grace of it all.

Writing Prompts:

Have you ever been near death?

What were the circumstances of your birth?

Have you ever been accused of something you didn't do?