How My Brain Works

As a proud owner of a Bachelor's degree in creative writing, I'd like to think I have a basic understanding of the editing process. On paper, it seems fairly easy: you write, you look for flaws in what you've written, you revise. Below is an excerpt from one of my college assignments, which may look familiar to some who know my work. I've since uploaded it here, as the prologue to a series I've named "Aidan and the Forest of Enq."

She finally stopped walking when she reached the top of the hill beyond the great Floating City, as the Forest of Enq prevented her from going any further. As if in a dream, she shuffled a bit further along the ridge until her toes touched the edge of the cliff. Her empty eyes traveled down the sheer wall of rock to its base, where the Glittering Sea butted up against the mainland. Her long, raven hair swirled around her face in the briny wind, as the roar of the waves pounded the bottom of the cliff below.

The white billows champed and stamped like wild horses, trying to climb up the rock wall to greet her; tempting her to join them. Beneath their deceivingly soft, frothy heads lurked jagged fangs of rock, the peaks of which were only ever visible for a few seconds at a time. Lavinia leaned over a little more, wondering how swiftly her death would come if she chose to fall into that stony maw.

That’s when she heard it.

I'm actually pretty proud of this piece overall, but I know there's always room for improvement. If anything, that is my Achilles' heel when it comes to my editing style: if it's not perfect, I keep tweaking and tweaking until I no longer recognize it. The trick is knowing when to stop, and I don't always know for sure when I've reached a stopping point.

The problem, I suppose, is that I get in my own way a lot. In my head, I see everything I write so vividly, like images on an IMAX movie screen. I can hear my character's voices, see their microscopic facial expressions when they move and speak. My goal is to get my readers to see what I see, but what's in my head doesn't always translate well into my fingertips. To that end, it's not uncommon for me to stay stuck on a particular chapter, paragraph, or sentence for literal weeks, trying to get what I imagine into a Word processor in a way that makes some kind of sense.

One of my writing professors once said that it's important to remember not everybody thinks the way you - the writer - does. What may seem obvious to you about a character or situation may be completely obtuse to your reader. While I try to keep that in mind, I'm well aware that I overcompensate a lot when it comes to subtlety and descriptions. One of my literary heroes is Charles Dickens, just for the style of his writing. I love his hyper-descriptive flair, because I believe it adds so much to the flavor of the text. For example, in his famous work "A Christmas Carol", look how he describes his main character, Ebenezer Scrooge:

"Oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!"

Sweet Baby Jesus, isn't that just beautiful? Doesn't it just make the back of your brain tingle in the best way? It does to me. Of course, I realize some of you may look at all those four-dollar words strung together in a run-on sentence and cringe, which is fair. No shade to Dickens, but I realize he isn't everyone's cup of tea. And you know what? That is perfectly okay.

While I admire the flow and verboseness of Dickens' work, it's easy for me to get carried away in descriptive words. I mean, who really needs fifteen words to describe a cliff with waves at the bottom? The way I've written it above drags a little too long, sacrificing the flow of the piece overall for a few minutes of descriptive text that the reader can really do without. Who hasn't seen a rocky cliff face in a movie or TV show before? My readers are smart; they already know what it looks like. Just move on and be done with it, right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately, my brain just won't allow me to move on. I want my readers to feel, hear, see, taste, and smell every part of a scene as vividly as I do. There's another aspect of editing that my professors taught me about in school, known lovingly as "killing your darlings". Sometimes, in order to trim the fat of a piece and make it flow as well as possible, you have to cut out parts you might really like. It sucks, but you really have to ask yourself: is that one scene where your main character and his second cousin twice removed talk about baseball really necessary for the plot? Most of the time, the answer - unfortunately - is no.

If you take too long focusing on one part of the story, it detracts from the whole work. The message or themes you're trying to get across can get lost in waters too muddied by descriptors, or slow the pace so much that your reader gets bored and abandons the story completely. That is truly a writer's worst nightmare. So, here's the piece again after my "darlings" are killed. I hope it still has the same impact after editing, and that it's still enjoyable to you as the reader.

She finally stopped at the top of the hill beyond the great Floating City, as the Forest of Enq prevented her from going any farther. As if in a dream, she shuffled along the ridge until her toes touched the cliff's edge. Her empty eyes traveled down the sheer wall of rock to its base, where the Glittering Sea butted up against the mainland. Her long, raven hair swirled around her face in the wind, as the roaring waves pounded the bottom of the cliff below.

The billows champed and stamped like wild horses, trying to climb up to greet her; tempting her to join them. Beneath their deceivingly soft, frothy heads lurked jagged rocky fangs, only visible for a few seconds at a time. Lavinia leaned over a little more, wondering how swiftly her death would come if she fell into that stony maw.

That’s when she heard it.