15Feb

Polishing

• Saved in: Craft
• by Chris Orcutt
• with Comments Off on Polishing

I’m in the mid­dle of pol­ish­ing my lat­est nov­el, and because I find the process so oner­ous, I’ve decid­ed to take a break from it and write about it instead.

Pol­ish­ing should in no way be con­fused with edit­ing. When you edit, in addi­tion to mov­ing pas­sages around and try­ing dif­fer­ent ways of say­ing the same line, what you’re real­ly look­ing for are oppor­tu­ni­ties to cut words. Once you’re able to do what William Faulkn­er said (“kill your darlings”—those pre­cious pet phras­es that don’t add to your sto­ry), you begin to look for­ward to hack­ing out large chunks of mate­r­i­al. Adjec­tives, sen­tences, para­graphs, scenes, and some­times whole chap­ters can be yanked and you don’t notice. In fact, the work gets bet­ter through omis­sion. You’re chip­ping away every­thing that does­n’t resem­ble an ele­phant. That’s edit­ing.

But pol­ish­ing is dif­fer­ent, and in many ways more dif­fi­cult. A pain in the ass, actu­al­ly. It reminds me of some­thing the inim­itable Oscar Wilde once said:

 

“I was work­ing on the proof of one of my poems all the morn­ing, and took out a com­ma. In the after­noon I put it back again.”

 

I’m not a Yoda writer yet, but back when I was still a Padouin Learn­er, I thought the above quote was ridicu­lous. Some­one could­n’t pos­si­bly have spent that much time debat­ing the mer­its of insert­ing or omit­ting a piece of punc­tu­a­tion. Come on. The fact is, I did­n’t know enough about writ­ing yet to under­stand how true it was.

In the ear­ly stages of writ­ing a book, like a bur­geon­ing romance every­thing is beau­ti­ful and full of poten­tial. You’re enrap­tured by the Idea. The char­ac­ters pul­sate with ener­gy. The pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. Then you write a draft. And anoth­er draft. And anoth­er draft. And each time you cre­ate a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the Idea, you deface the Idea a lit­tle bit, until you reach a point where you real­ize your cre­ation will nev­er match up with the Idea, and that the best you can hope to do is present your sul­lied thing in the best light pos­si­ble.

By the time you reach the pol­ish­ing stage, you’re sick of the book. But you have to read it one more time—at least. You lit­er­al­ly get nau­seous. The process is made even more poignant because you know you’re going to have to face all of the imper­fec­tions and fail­ures that, at your cur­rent state of writer­ly devel­op­ment, you are unable to fix. The feel­ing you get is, I imag­ine, a lot like the feel­ing a divorced per­son gets when forced to see his/her ex-spouse at child vis­i­ta­tions.

 

“Hey, I’m sor­ry. I did the best I could. Why are you bring­ing that up again? We’ve gone over this. What do you want from me? I said I was sor­ry. Good­bye.”

 

If your sto­ry is tight and fair­ly well-told, by the time you get to pol­ish­ing, you know you can’t rad­i­cal­ly improve it. You know that no mat­ter how nice­ly you buff the suck­er, it’s only going to gleam so much. And if it’s a turd, well, for­get it. A turd pol­ished is still a turd.

Here are some of the things I focus on dur­ing pol­ish­ing. I call this my Hunt­ing List:

 

• Remov­ing every unnec­es­sary adverb, which means vir­tu­al­ly all of them.
• Remov­ing unnec­es­sary com­mas to increase read­ing speed, or putting some in (see above) for clar­i­ty.
• Remov­ing extra­ne­ous dash­es and semi­colons.
• Chang­ing verbs from past pro­gres­sives (e.g., “was run­ning”) to sim­ple past tense (e.g., “ran”).
• Elim­i­nat­ing small, extra­ne­ous “word pack­ages,” which often start with prepo­si­tions.
• Elim­i­nat­ing as many attri­bu­tions (i.e., he said.) as pos­si­ble, but not to the point where it’s ever unclear who is speak­ing.
• Sub­sti­tut­ing more pic­turesque verbs and spe­cif­ic nouns for the lamer ones on the page.
• Clar­i­fy­ing any­thing con­fus­ing and “plant­i­ng” infor­ma­tion that becomes impor­tant lat­er in the sto­ry.

 

I read some­where that every book teach­es the writer what he needs to learn to tell that sto­ry, but one thing I’ve found is that pol­ish­ing nev­er gets any eas­i­er.

Some of you may be read­ing this and say­ing, “Quit your whin­ing. At least you’re work­ing on a fin­ished book.” And you’d be right.

But this still does­n’t change the fact that what I’d rather be doing is star­ing at a New Idea. A New Idea, stand­ing on a hill in the spring sun­shine, the sweet nec­tary breeze blow­ing her gin­ger hair around. She waves to me. The breeze flaps her sun­dress. She laughs, beck­ons me with a fin­ger and departs over the hill. I’m about to run after her when I hear Old Idea, my bat­tle axe of a book, screech­ing at me to come back down and clean the gut­ters.

I’m feel­ing ill again. Must be pol­ish­ing time.

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