In Praise of Waffle: the danger of editing your stories out of existence

***No plots or denouements were harmed or mistreated in any way in the making of this blog entry (for once)***

Well, I had to, didn't I?

Recently, I’ve been recalling a quote made by Andrew Motion about his time as a Booker Prize judge, where he explained that many of the novels he read for the prize ‘needed a good edit’.  His emphasis was more on the care and support an author’s novel gets (or doesn’t get) from the Publisher: ‘Not nearly enough novels get the editing they need’.

But it made me think about a view that’s prevalent nowadays amongst creative writing circles, that good writing is about expressing something succinctly, with no extraneous word, and every word that’s used contributing towards the whole. In short, that more stories nowadays could ‘do with a good edit’. The style en vogue in creative writing, I would say, is very much the style we might associate with American writers like Raymond Carver. Carver was known for following a particular writing process where he would go over his story draft again and again and pare down the words to the bare minimum.

Six Books in need of a good edit

You can see why a poet like Andrew Motion would make this comment: poetry is all about paying attention to each individual word, and its place within the poem, and using each word to its maximum effect: being alive to the different meanings that might be given by its particular location within a poem. And this isn’t to criticize Raymond Carver either, as I’m a big fan of his work. But at the same time, it strikes me that this is only one view of what good writing should be about. You have only to go back to the great 19^th Century novels, to find a rather different model of writing.

And here comes the History bit....

Dickens is hardly known for his brevity of expression. Indeed sometimes he uses ten words where one will do. And yet interest in him is still very much alive, with 2012 seeing many events that celebrate the bicentenary of his birth.

Herman Melville, one of my favourite writers, was hardly a succinct writer either. Indeed, many of the first readers of Moby Dick would probably have appreciated it had that work been given a thorough edit. A key feature of the novel is that the story is interspersed with chapters that interrupt the main narrative and provide a learned disquisition on different kinds of whales, which – one might say - effectively slows down the ‘action’ of the novel.

But the whole point about Moby Dick is that it’s rough around the edges. It’s not supposed to be clean, and neat. It’s about the smell of sea and rope.

In a letter written after he’d finished the novel, he famously confided: ‘I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb’. The novel is often seen as being about the search for meaning, or as in some way enacting that quest (and the attendant perils) and as such it’s entirely appropriate that it ended up being like the behemoth that is the subject of the story.

If floundering in your argument, invoke the Bard ...

"Words, words, words"

Perhaps the idea of giving something ‘a good edit’ is the kind of comment that’s most frequently made by one contemporary about another, rather than by posterity (posterity often seems much kinder about these things)

Ben Jonson famously wrote down this anecdote about Shakespeare in the papers that were found after his death:

I remember, the players have often mentioned it 
as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing 
(whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. 
My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.

So, Shakespeare, one of the greats of all time, was judged by Jonson as lacking the ability to edit his own work – and as being someone who was too easily satisfied with the standard of the plays he wrote.

It’s a feature of Shakespeare we often forget that his plays actually require editing every time they’re staged. It’s very unusual to see a performance of the complete text: scenes, characters or lines are cut as a matter of course. Witness how unusual it was when Kenneth Branagh released his film of Hamlet which dramatizes the complete script.

Being a photo of a moustache in need of a good edit

We simply accept the fact that the plays work without certain lines, scenes and characters. And yet we don’t, for a moment, hold this against Shakespeare and condemn him as a writer who was unable to polish his own work. Indeed, modern audiences happily do without the long-winded wordplay or comic larking about that the Elizabethans so loved. In a recent documentary on Hamlet presented by David Tennant, one Academic even suggested that the 'bad quarto' of Hamlet (the supposedly unreliable text of Hamlet that didn't reflect Shakespeare's intentions) has a lot going for it in being shorter and snappier than the canonical version.

Time for an analogy...

I would argue that the editing process isn’t just about paring down, removing and deleting. It’s not about cutting the pieces off the rock until we get to the irreducible diamond. For me, it's not about finding the tiny precious gem in the hunk of raw material, and sometimes it's better to leave some bits of the raw material behind.

Blogger in search of a diamond

So what am I saying? That verbosity is good? No. But I think one person's view of what's extraneous isn't necessarily the same as another. In his introduction to Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien explained that he sometimes received letters where readers complained about particular characters, or scenes and he was amused that these characters or scenes were often ones that other readers declared were their favourite. 

So, to use the diamond analogy again, what one reader may dismiss as the extraneous material, other readers value as the diamond. One could take it further, and suggest that the artist or creator of the work themselves aren't always able to discern the gem from the stone. Or rather, that in applying certain subjective (and quite harsh) criterion, the creator can often end up rejecting something that still has meaning and value for others.

To use an example from popular culture, there's an interesting interview with Christopher Lee where he talks about the making of The Wicker Man, and bemoans the fact that the finished film bore little resemblance to the much better film they had scripted. Generations of movie-goers still value the film that they ended up making - indeed it's often ranked as one of the best films of its kind.

At least the Wicker Man was actually released - even if not in the form that was originally intended. Think of Kafka who was ambivalent towards his work to the extent that he didn't even want it to see the light of day, and asked Max Brod to burn his unpublished work after his death (although Brod made it clear that he no intention of doing so).

Rather than think of editing a work as being about cutting something to the bone, I'd like to suggest another model might be equally effective - that of jazz improvision. Not every note of a solo is needed, not every note is possibly as effective as it could be, there are musical phrases that could equally well be replaced by others. There may be times when the musician loses the attention of the listener momentarily (or for longer). The key thing is not that the musician comes up with something perfect and flawless, but that what they create is something that excites our interest most of the time, that sustains our interest most of the time and (if that interest is lost) that recovers it quickly. 

If we're reading a novel and don't like the direction the plot has taken or think a particular scenario is unrealistic, or we don't believe in the action of a character, our interest is still recoverable provided the rest of the novel engages us. But of course, if there are too many unrealistic scenarios or situations that don't ring true, our interest will be permanently compromised.

Couldn't resist this one.......