Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 0
Total Queries: 6
Scenes Arranged: 4
Total Scenes: 214
I didn’t send a query yesterday and probably won’t today either. My goal was 5-7 per week and I’m right there. I’m giving myself breathing room to be tired, which I am. I did get a few scenes in yesterday and checked off another guidepost on the Fourth Eighth so that’s good. More today? Maybe.
Filling the Well
That Hideous Strength: 89%
Elegy: Page 40 of 89
I got to read a little bit last night in and amongst everything else going on yesterday. It was a good day.
Polishing the Well
So much went on yesterday. My wife had a wedding while I had the kids. We cleaned. We ate. We watched Hairspray again. It was a good time. Then I got a little work done last night until I couldn’t hold my eyes open anymore.
Well Chat
Fewer Words = Greater Punch
When I say “Prosaic Efficiency” I mean the literal translation of the word Prosaic as in prose. If you want your words to mean something, to affect your reader more often and in greater ways, you can’t be verbose. That was something I learned in the Draft 6 edit. I was told early on by my editor that I had to cut my word count in half because, as a debut, 168,000 words was daunting and worrying for most agents. At first, I wondered how I was going to do that, but eventually I got around to it.
Now, granted, there was some rearrangement in there, but the important thing was that I cut the fat. There were many instances where I was just using too many words to say a simple thing. Plus, I had a ton of information on the page that was not yet relevant. I got so hung up in my world building that I started to lose the story. Cutting some of that stuff went a long way toward lowering my word count.
The portion of that edit that is relevant to this chat, though, is where I pared down the amount of words I was using and still said the same thing. When you read a sentence, your brain has to process it. If I say “a dark gray pachyderm with a short tail raising its naturally long trunk to the sky in a blast of wind to speak to the rest of her herd” it’s 29 words; that’s a lot to process. If I change it to say “an elephant trumpeted to greet her herd” that gets the same sentence across in 7 words. That’s a 75% reduction in word count. That means your brain has to work 75% less hard to consume that sentence. Plus, instead of having the image spoon fed to you so that your brain has to build it piece by piece, only enough pieces are given to frame the image so that your brain can fill it in from there.
This sounds like more work on your brain, but in fact, we’re wired for this. It’s been proven that human brains are wired for story; it’s how we communicate events. Thus, our brains, as the efficient machines they are, attempt to jump forward in the story and fill it in to save time and anticipate what’s coming. In the earlier, longer sentence, your brain was already doing this, but it kept having to check its work as more details were revealed. In the shorter sentence, it filled in the scene and asked, “Good enough?” Without any additional words to contradict it, your brain could stop processing that image and move onto the next. This is more efficient and more enjoyable for your readers.
So in drafting, write however you want, but in editing, cut the fat. Your readers, and your own brain, will thank you.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG