Tight Writing

He hesitated a moment before shrugging his shoulders, finally nodding his head and, in quite an inelegant gesture, suddenly threw up all over the shoes that she wore that day, almost entirely covering them with the contents of his poor stomach.

If I were to read such a sentence in a book—and it was not intended to be an illustration of inelegant writing—it would be the last sentence I read in that book. I would rant to Jan about poor editing and read something else. I don’t expect to find so many egregious errors in one sentence in anything I choose to read. A gradual accumulation of such errors scattered throughout a book has the same ultimate effect on my reading pleasure: it convinces me that the author is not a fine writer. At some point, unless the story was really good, I’d give up and choose something else to read. Even if I got through that book, I’d never read another from that author.

As the title to this piece suggests, my prejudice is for tight writing over loose, sloppy stuff. I fill my first drafts with the type of errors I’ve illustrated. I catch them as I self-edit, but invariably introduce a new problem or two. My penultimate step before sending a manuscript to readers (or to agents and publishers) is to eliminate my excesses.

I have a list of individual words I overuse, redundant or inactive phrases I unthinkingly write and other faux pas I regularly commit. I use Microsoft Word’s search function to find them; then I try to fix each one.

Try 2:

He hesitated a moment, before shrugging his shoulders,shrugged finally nodding his head and, in quite an inelegant gesture, suddenly threw up all over the shoes that she wore that day, almost entirely covering them with the contents of his poor stomachspewed vomit on her feet.

This edited version is tight. It might even be too tight and need fleshing out with powerful action or description. For example, in reviewing the edit, I probably include a description of the “inelegant gesture” to show what it was, rather than telling of its existence. However, with the initial edit I eliminated many of my pet peeves.

All hesitations are for a moment. It is impossible to shrug anything other than one’s shoulders (although one can shrug into clothes). Two delaying tactics may be one too many, but a third is tiresome (and one can only nod a head). ‘Finally’ occurs in the middle of the sentence. It is not his final act; puking his guts out is.

‘Quite’ is superfluous, and if you require the emphasis, use a more descriptive modifier. ‘Suddenly,’ rarely is. ‘Threw up’ is ugly, but not very active; ‘spew’ paints a more vivid picture. The ’all over’ doesn’t add anything (we didn’t think he vomited a single dainty drop on one toe, did we?) particularly when we are told the vomit didn’t completely cover her shoes.

Kill weak modifiers such as ‘almost’ and ‘entirely;’ give specificity. The phrase ‘that she wore that day’ has too many ‘that ‘modifiers. We can assume she wore the shoes and the action did not occur over a multi-day period. Eliminate contradictions and irrelevancies. We want to know why he vomited and what her reaction was. Stomachs are not wealthy or impoverished; save ‘poor’ to describe those without money.

I commit other atrocities in early drafts, but I’ll save you and not describe all my crap writing (N.B. not all OF my crap writing). After I beat my blunders into submission, the final step I take is to reread the manuscript and discover errors I introduced in fixing the last batch of problems.

When you read, what sets your teeth on edge? When you write, what sloppy habits must you fix in your editing?

~ Jim