Welcome to Death Of 1000 Cuts – making you an awesome writer, one cut at a time.

Sorry for the delay in getting this week’s post up. I have been editing my own novel, which as you can imagine is a pretty traumatic process. Coming face to face with my own shitty dialogue and improbable plot detours and dreadful, clanging similes, then, surrounded by compelling evidence of my incompetence, trying to keep faith that I can write quality prose to replace them, is neither an easy nor comforting job. I’m more or less done, but I smell bad.

The upshot of all this is that I’m feeling both empathic to the plight of aspiring writers, and extremely pissed off with words. Which is the perfect headspace for In The Barber’s Chair. I still need first pages of novels and short stories, folks. Please try to make sure it’s your best work – spend some time editing and reviewing it before submitting. There’s no value in my engaging with your writing unless it’s the absolute best you can do. Send them in the body of an email (250 words max) via the ‘Contact Me’ link on the right. Cheers!

Right, as always, read the extract below, decide what you think (this is, after all, about developing your editing skills) then read my thoughts after ‘The Cuts’.

Untitled by Thomas

She wasn’t meant to be sweaty. Stuck fast with the dew of sleeping too long, her lips opened slowly. Her eyes remained tight, wincing against the sun that poured in over the trees.

“Why is it… so hot?”, she asked of the front room of the shelter they slept in. Her head turned heavily and her eyes adjusted to the shadows over the empty bed behind her. “Urghghg, why didn’t you wake me?” she muttered accusingly as she turned onto her side, kicked the last of the blanket from her feet, and scanned the clearing in front of their home for signs of her mother.

Swinging gently, one hand hooked over the familiar knot in the door frame, Rebecca leaned out of the cabin. ”Muuuuu – umm” she called. The first note “Muuuu” sung up high, the second “umm” a deeper shorter finish, both dropped away as they hit the smooth trunks and sweeping leaves of the palms that lined the clearing on every side.

“Muuuuu – umm”. Her mum was always quick to answer. “Beeeee – caa” she would sing back, using the same two notes. They were so used to it, they could replace the call with just “laaaaa – aa” or even whistle the two notes and they would know it was each other.

Rebecca stopped swinging and stepped further out into the full glare of the sun. “Muuuuu – umm”. Only snatches of the nearby stream broke through the muggy quiet of the late morning.

The Cuts

She wasn’t meant to be sweaty.

Yes, okay. This is an acceptable first line. It’s not especially resonant but it’s quirky enough to raise a few questions.

Some opening sentences aren’t good in themselves, but they serve to prepare us and build our anticipation for the solid content that follows. They’re like walking through the woods, and finding a big arrow lit by flashing red bulbs that reads: ‘PARTY – THIS WAY’. As a reader, we’re like, ‘Sweet,’ and we follow the arrow to see where it leads us.

You can even repeat this over several lines, withholding information and raising more questions. At its best, this technique can ramp up our anticipation even more, like following a series of brightly-coloured arrows through our hypothetical night-time woodlands. Done well, we start thinking ‘oh my God, if they’ve gone to all this effort just on the signs, this is going to be an awesome party’. And our adrenalin starts pumping and we’re ready to boogie.

But this can only go on for so long. At some point you have to give us the party. And if that party turns out to be a pot-bellied old man masturbating in a tin bath, we’re going to be pretty pissed off.

Stuck fast with the dew of sleeping too long, her lips opened slowly.

Oh God – wanking old guy, wanking old guy.

Seriously: ‘the dew of sleeping too long’? Are you under a curse where you can’t use certain words? Will the dog go mental if it hears the word ‘mucus’?

As a writer, don’t be afraid to say what you mean. You don’t have to garland your every sentence in fruity abstrusions. The only downside to this tactic is that it will quickly expose a lack of content. But desperate cackhanded ostentation does that anyway.

That is the first of this sentence’s failings, which are many and grave.

So you lead with a huge adjectival clause. It’s not till 11 words into the sentence that we discover the noun it’s modifying. This kind of structure is fine if we can guess, contextually, what the initial clause is likely to be about, i.e.

Geoff stopped and gazed up at the giant albino kangaroo. 60 feet tall and patterned with scrofula scars, it was one nasty bastard.

You could even use a big adjectival clause to deliberately mislead the reader, switching out the expected subject for another though I imagine the applications would be largely comedic.

Your sentence does not meet any of these criteria. It’s not until we come to the end of the clause that we can formulate a reasonable guess as to what it might be talking about (her, eyelids right?) then the sentence takes a weird hairpin and tells us it’s actually her lips which are stuck together.

Who the fuck wakes up with their lips stuck together? That’s not a thing. Not only that – you tell us her lips were ‘stuck fast’. Then by the end of the line they’re opening! That’s like writing:

Lying totally dead on the floor of his garage, Geoff groaned and opened his eyes.

Except that my sentence implies ‘sweet zombie protagonist’. Yours implies ‘guys I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing seriously help’.

Her eyes remained tight, wincing against the sun that poured in over the trees.

A good rule of thumb is: strip down a sentence to the fewest clauses necessary. In this instance, better to write:

Her closed eyes winced at the sunlight pouring over the trees.

Note ‘winced at’ rather than ‘against’. I’m not convinced that sun ‘pouring’ isn’t lazy cliché but let’s pick our battles, eh Thomas? I’d go further and suggest you do a bit of tree-search (hey, sweet portmanteau bro – thanks bro) and replace ‘trees’ with the specific type: hornbeam or pine or yew. Specificity makes prose crunchy and real, and will immediately give us some clue as to where this narrative takes place. It’s the secret of economical exposition.

“Why is it… so hot?”, she asked of the front room of the shelter they slept in.

Right – no comma after the dialogue, please. That is the simplest of my complaints.

This line might as well read:

‘Why is it… so hot?’ she asked of the blah blah blah I’m lying to you.

Having people talk to themselves is a shitty convention from TV. The beauty of working in a written medium is that you can give us direct access to any characters’ thoughts without making them do something stupid and unnatural. By all means, have her wonder why it’s so hot. But don’t start her soliloquising like some codpiece-clad stage villain. Although if she says: ‘Fie! Methinks a Promethean finger doth pry the lock ‘pon the strongroom of my slumber,’ then I’m down like a clown.

No need to use the dialogue tag ‘asked’ after a question. I’m going to be railing against overdetermined dialogue tags until I die, aren’t I?

That double ‘of’ construction is hella ugly. No need to add ‘they slept in’ at the end. That should be self-fucking-evident from the fact she’s just woken up in it. Indeed, there’s lots of clumsy exposition in this sentence that drags us out of the moment and draws our attention to the writer instead of the story. Stop it.

Her head turned heavily and her eyes adjusted to the shadows over the empty bed behind her.

No need for the ‘and’. Split into two discrete sentences.

I’ll concede that this feels like it could, possibly, be the first glimmer of a story. An empty bed. Maybe someone is missing? Please fuck let somebody be missing.

“Urghghg, why didn’t you wake me?” she muttered accusingly as she turned onto her side, kicked the last of the blanket from her feet, and scanned the clearing in front of their home for signs of her mother.

Thomas, I am sure you are a splendid, worthwhile person, but ‘she muttered accusingly’?

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOOU!

Ah. That feels better.

You can cut a bunch out of this sentence. For starters, ‘as’ is a lie. Unless she is the world’s slowest speaker, that sentence is not simultaneous with everything that you describe after it. So cut the asinine grunt-coinage, then end the sentence after ‘she said’ (which you’re going to change the dialogue tag to otherwise I will kill every man, woman and child in the British Isles so help me God). No need for ‘onto her side’, nor ‘in front of their home’ (she knows where it is – stop sticking in signposts for the reader’s benefit), nor ‘signs of her’ (we know it’s her mother, and ‘signs of’ is just weirdly finicky).

Thus, the sentence becomes:

‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ she said. She turned, kicked the last of the blanket from her feet, and scanned the clearing for mother.

Hardly life-changing, but at least it’s not a horrid thicket of redundant words.

Swinging gently, one hand hooked over the familiar knot in the door frame, Rebecca leaned out of the cabin.

Leaving it this late to tell her name – and then revealing it so arbitrarily – really jars. Let us know earlier, or hold back until she encounters another character and the name is revealed through dialogue.

”Muuuuu – umm” she called. The first note “Muuuu” sung up high, the second “umm” a deeper shorter finish, both dropped away as they hit the smooth trunks and sweeping leaves of the palms that lined the clearing on every side.

You know what I don’t need in my life? A detailed breakdown of the interval between auxiliary notes in a fictional character’s speech. Unless intonation is of literal life-and-fucking-death importance in this story, then Do. Not. Tell. Me.

Phonetic renderings of dialogue are super-perilous. Most of the time, they rapidly become irritating. Unless you’re an absolute master of dialect, or the narrative itself is written in some phonetic way, stick to standard spellings.

“Muuuuu – umm”. Her mum was always quick to answer. “Beeeee – caa” she would sing back, using the same two notes. They were so used to it, they could replace the call with just “laaaaa – aa” or even whistle the two notes and they would know it was each other.

So now this isn’t even happening? Now you’re giving us the intonation of a hypothetical response.

This is your first fucking page, dude. This is where your novel makes its bid for the reader’s attention, where it says: ‘continuing to read me is of more value than putting this book down and spending time with loved ones, or going for a walk, or sleeping. Invest some of your finite life in reading this book.’

Cut all this small-potatoes texture work and get to the meat of the story.

‘But it’s world-building!’ I hear you cry. ‘It makes the reader believe in the fictional universe and thus feel more invested in the characters.’

No. Wrongo. Readers are deeply irrational creatures. What makes them believe in your fictional universe is story. Put the characters under stress. Give them needs then deny them those needs. We buy into a novel primarily on the level of empathy. Intellectual evaluations come later (and are important, to be sure) but when we’re starting out, you need to give us a healthy dose of shit hitting the fan.

What’s the story of this first page? Rebecca’s mum is missing.

That’s a good inciting incident! So why do you make us work so hard to discover it? It’s like you’re desperate to disguise the story.

I don’t see what a lengthy waking-up sequence adds to our understanding or engagement. Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t tell us that Rebecca’s mum is missing in the first sentence. Open with it. Why hold back?

This is fine as a first draft. You’re discovery writing. You’re finding out about the world as you write it. But good editing is about remembering that the reader doesn’t necessarily want to come on that journey with you. That’s why writers get paid (after a fashion) and readers pay. A first draft is a journey, but it’s a long and boring one. Marred by diarrhoea. Don’t give us the holiday snaps. Cut to the adventure.

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If you enjoyed this, I expect you’ll enjoy my award-winning book on writing, publishing, and crushing disappointment, We Can’t All Be Astronauts.

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