How many words could a wordhack cram if a wordhack could cram words?

[wayfaringwordhack]

I am such a wordy writer.  I don't generally go in for plain, terse prose.  Nor do I go in for melodramatic said bookisms and character actions or thoughts writ out in a series over-the-top adjectives and adverbs.

Maybe it's an aversion to the above that constantly drives me to "explain" so much, spelling out my melodrama instead of employing it in punchy one-worders.  Or maybe it's like The Animals sang, "Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood" (not in reference to the whole song, just that refrain), and I fear leaving any room for the reader to picture something "wrong."

Oh what a stamp of amateurism.  That's moi, the amateur.  Here is a snippet of before and after from an middle grade novel I am working on:

Hoping she wouldn’t regret her action, she whispered a little greeting to the trees and reached out to run her hand along the branch of what looked to be a juniper.  Bits of craggy bark flaked off under her touch.  A tiny spider skittered across her knuckles and down the branch.  To her surprise, the tree’s needles were kitten-whisker soft.  Wisps of gray moss hung from every horizontal branch like the ghostly remnants of banners from long ago.  Though she felt no wind, the moss stirred gently, the trailing tips pointing back the way they had come.  A warning to turn around?  

Minus about 15 words:

Hoping not to regret it, she whispered a greeting to the trees and ran her hand along the branch of what looked to be a juniper.  Bits of craggy bark flaked off.  A tiny spider skittered across her knuckles and down the branch.  The tree’s needles were kitten-whisker soft.  Wispy gray moss hung from every horizontal branch like the ghostly remnants of age-old banners.  Though she felt no wind, the moss stirred gently, the trailing tips pointing back the way her party had come.  A warning to turn around?

It would be a lie to say I am perfectly happy to write wordy and then pare down.  I need to write how I write and not get hung up on getting it "right" from the get-go. But I also need to be able to SEE when I am wordy and stop all those weasels from clogging up the prose.  And I don't always see.

For me, the word of is usually an indicator that I am complicating things.  I think this is partly from French and the way de works (especially in terms of possessives) and partly from the older books I read where the formulation was often "the something of something." 

I know in my example "looked to be" could seem weasely, but I am actually describing a place unlike others, so I don't want to declare what something is.  That is the balance: being able to state things plainly when, yes, it is that thing and knowing when to cut.  I did want the idea of the MC being surprised by the expectation of feeling poky leaves and instead having them be soft. But there, I decided, the descriptor wasn't necessary.  I THINK it still conveys enough without me telling the reader how the MC felt.

That is my craft ramble for the day. You may now get back to your regularly scheduled program...

 

Comments

[asakiyume]

The only change I would have made to your first draft (which you did in fact make in your second, heh) would be to take out the "reached out to run her hand..."

As for the rest, I thought the first draft was excellent--I liked "under her touch" after "Bits of craggy bark" and I liked "To her surprise" before the part about the kitten-whisker soft needles. I just don't see those things as clogging up the prose at all.

Which isn't to say that I didn't like the second draft. I did like it! I just didn't like it *more*. Both these paragraphs sound excellent to me.

All the tinkering we do to our writing is, I think, to satisfy ourselves and what we're hoping to achieve, how we want the story to sound. It's not about some objective improvement (there's not much that's objective about writing style, I don't think)--it's about getting to a place where you're happy. In the end, readers won't be reading all your drafts, they'll read only a final version you're satisfied with, and they'll have a reaction to the story as a whole, to all the elements. Yes, some line-by-line things, but also characterization, plot, etc. etc. etc. And some people will love everything, some people will love most things, some people will be take-it-or-leave-it, etc. And you'll be writing for the people who are in the love camp. They're your audience!

[wayfaringwordhack]

You make an excellent point about readers not getting every draft and feeling the thing as a whole. In general, I think that is the problem with "snippets." You are showing such an isolated bit that it is not always easy to know how the ensemble would read.

I am going to keep your thoughts in mind when I go back over this in the future and have, hopefully, made Thorn's voice more present in this volume. Did you read The Golden Apple (the excerpt is from the sequel)? It was so long ago.

[asakiyume]

I don't think I have!

I read portions of the one with a terrible wasting sickness, and I read all of one draft of To Be Undone

[wayfaringwordhack]

*nods* So part of my trouble is that I felt she had a good voice in the first one and that the prose was more direct. I am trying to get back into it, but all progress is sporadic. :P

[asakiyume]

Sure, that makes sense: you want to have a consistent tone/style.