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What do dieting and writing have in common? They often travel together—and should. In writing, to diet means to determine what words, phrases, and extraneous content need to go. They represent the unwanted pounds that weigh down a manuscript.

Revision gives the writer an opportunity to go through her copy to tighten her sentences and rephrase passages for the most effective copy possible. According to best-selling author Roy Peter Clark, “…The concrete noun lets us see and the action verb helps us move. Experts on writing have always preferred strong nouns and verbs.”

For several years, writers have been urged to “trim the fat” of extraneous adverbs and adjectives. We’re encouraged to use lean, mean story construction for readers’ pleasure, while holding and expanding that pleasure with the ebb and flow of concrete detail and curiosity-generating abstract thought.

Purpose-driven writing takes time to conceive and deliver. Those in the writing business today have many recommendations for writers about their content. For instance, web content has specific parameters for the writer; length should run within 250-500 words, snappy headline titles grab a reader’s interest; copy should have plenty of pertinent links to other sites for more information.

When you stop to consider that readers of web content are, in general, looking for particular subjects, research material, etc., the standards derived are necessary and make sense. Keywords used within the copy help snag attention from search engines, while the organization of the copy finishes drawing in those engines.

Novels and magazines don’t have search engines, but searches are made. Readers talk to each other. The discoveries of one become shared knowledge and generate recommendations to other readers. Therefore, the same logic applies to novels.

Interest and reader staying-power is forfeited, if detailed descriptions bog down the reader’s quest to move with the story line. With non-fiction, writing rules for fiction can prevent an article from boring the reader to death. Poetry, too, uses some of fiction’s rules to keep the reader motivated and moving forward to the end.

The diet begins when the first draft is complete. Experienced writers know that by the time the first revision is finished, their stories have passed one hurdle of the editing process. Entire swathes of descriptive narrative lay on the editing floor. Subtext paths that went nowhere are removed. Most of all, the concrete feel of the piece has come to the foreground.

Parts and pieces of story line, description, character backstory, etc. have bitten the bullet, dying as they lived; in that brief twilight second from the writer’s hand.

With the second revision, more noun changes with precise action verbs bring paragraphs to attention. The few remaining adjectives are trade

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Despite the fact that I have two full shelves dedicated to grammar books, collections of quotes, and dictionaries, I am no linguistical babe.  I'm just going along for the ride, mostly, reading my grammar books like I might read a novel, stopping and grinning over the nuggets I find.

This morning, in Roy Peter Clark's The Glamour of Grammar,  I was reading about blended words, otherwise known as portmanteaus—multidude, slackademic, Octomom, blog, even—and thinking back on all the fun I've had making up terms and getting away with it. I do more of that on this blog than I do in my fiction, but in the book that I've just completed writing, there are characters so set outside the norm of social exchange that their way of speaking necessarily involves their own idiosyncratic construction of language.  It was thrilling for one such as me, a rule breaker at heart, to live inside that sphere for the past few years.  I'm already missing the writing of that novel.

Oh, and yes.  That really is a chandelier hanging from the shovel face of a backhoe.  I found it yesterday upon leaving the gym, where I'd been Zumba dancing.

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I’m slowly making my way through the keynote addresses from last week’s Writing Institute.  Today I bring to you my notes and some highlights from Roy Peter Clark’s speech, “The Power of the Parts: How Writers Learn and How Teachers Teach.” Clark wrote a book I’ve been reading for awhile now, Writing Tools: 50 Essential [...]

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