First Drafts and Onions
Peeling Back the Layers
I’ve often thought that editing an early draft is a bit like peeling an onion. Both can certainly make me cry! But like an onion, the outer layers of a manuscript need to be taken off, in order to reveal the shiny smooth surface within.
So what are the redundant layers of an early version of our work? Obviously that depends from writer to writer – we all have our linguistic quirks. In my writing, it’s taking out extraneous words. Is there one term that can replace wordier originals? So ‘walked towards’ could be ‘approached,’ ‘said quietly’ could be ‘murmured’, ‘pushed gently’ could be ‘nudged.’ You get the idea…
The next layer is to take out all the ‘weasel words’ such as ‘just’, ‘very’, ‘every’, ‘some’, ‘really’ etc (see separate blog post of that name).
I see those as a kind of literary throat clearing – the reader often doesn’t need these little words to make sense of our writing – and taking them out makes our prose (or poetry) cleaner and sharper.
Then there’s other things that can annoy readers: unnecessary repetition, inconsistencies, ambiguity, generalisations. Again, this can vary from writer to writers.
All these layers need to go, but the analogy between editing and peeling an onion works in another way too. An onion is usable once you have reached the main part – the papery or bruised early layers have gone, but you still have an intact shape. But if you keep on removing layers the process goes into reverse: you are shedding perfectly good material and there is a danger you will end up with nothing.
It’s the same with writing. Sometimes we become so zealous in stripping out our texts that we extract the good along with the bad. So what is the point of no return? At which stage have we removed all the extraneous details and are beginning to cut away the good stuff? I guess it’s a question of judgement – or sometimes using mentors or beta readers to help us get it right.
So let’s make sure our writing, like our onions, are as whole and shiny as possible!