Steps to Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Your Writing
The convenience store chain am/pm is located in many US states and several foreign countries. ARCO owns them, so when you fill your gas tank, you can also load up on junk food.
The chain has a mascot called Toomgis, which a faux acronym for “Too much good stuff.” Toomgis is a rather vile-looking creature if you are a dentist, diabetic, or anyone concerned about their health.
All his body parts are composed of string licorice, donuts, bags of chips, and candy bars. His arms are soft drink cups, and his hands are made of cinnamon rolls with hot dog fingers.
A lot of Christian writing is like Toomgis. Authors and bloggers load their writing with what they think is sweet stuff, but which ultimately is unhealthy to readers.
A Major Misconception About Writing
Most writers see words as bricks; their job is to use them to build a structure, whether a blog post, chapter, or entire book. Every brick counts. They don’t want to leave any bricks out, especially the ones they think are pretty.
I take a different approach. I see a blog post or book as a marble monolith. My job is to chip away at it to find the beautiful statue hidden within it.
The marble is like a first draft. You should never intend your first draft to be your finished work. You want to download your ideas from your mind to the page in a rapid, wild frenzy. You want to capture your untainted creativity. Only then does the real work of writing begin.
At its heart, revision is a subtractive process, not an additive one.
What do you do once you have your block of marble? You chip away at it to remove all the detritus to find the beauty within. In sculpture, this is done by carving, cutting, sanding, and polishing the stone. In writing, we call it revision. It is not editing. Editing comes after the final revision.
Getting Rid of the “Good Stuff” is Hard to Do
The advice that writers must “kill their darlings” has been around for a long time. It was coined by Arthur Quiller-Couch in the nineteenth century and repeated famously (without attribution) by William Faulkner and later Stephen King.
What does it mean to “kill your darlings?” It means eliminating elements you love that do not serve your story.
I Killed One of My Darlings
For example, my late friend Michael Hemmingson, an insightful ethnographer and pulp fiction writer, and I often traded works-in-progress for feedback. He saved me from a fate worse than literary death by strongly suggesting I remove the prologue to my novel Jet Pink. Why would I do that, I wondered? After all, I had written it on a bench in the lovely Luxembourg Gardens on one of my many visits to Paris.
The prologue was filled with some of my most significant intellectual ponderings. Plus, I had a delightful memory of writing it. How bad could it be? It was the darling introduction to my experiment in Christian/Dadaism fiction.
But Michael was right. I cut it and replaced it with a quote from Russian theologian Nicolas Berdyaev. It was more to the point of my novel and far less pretentious than what I had written. I murdered one of my darlings. In that case, it was the mass annihilation of seven pages.
The Darlings I See That Must Die
I do a lot of developmental /substantive editing for clients, and I see the darlings fall into two major categories.
Off-topic escapades. I learned the ultimate theological question during my academic studies. It is: “So what?” That question is an effective filter to ask when people go off on a tangent about their favorite theological topic. Not surprisingly, it also works well in the writing world. Read the last five pages you wrote. Be honest. Does it reinforce what you want to say, or have you started chasing rabbits? Keep on course.
Purple Prose. That’s the flowery language many people use to adorn their writing. Christian writers seem to do a lot of it. Writing is encoding the images in your mind into words, and your readers should be able to decode your words to capture the image you had. Convoluted writing, flowery or not, works against you and the reader.
Once you get rid of these things, you can begin to polish so readers can see every fold and wrinkle that brings your story alive. It is hard to understand this when we speak of words on a page.
The essence of this writing-as-sculpture came to me one day as I gazed upon Michelangelo’s “La Pieta” in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The form, created by chipping away at a block of marble, is breathtaking.
Editing is More Than Grammar
Grammar is a necessity for the encoding/decoding process I mentioned earlier. Yet, writing is far more following a set of rules you learned in English Composition class years ago. The English language constantly changes, and Christian writers must change with it.
I have been an editor for many decades. I understand and appreciate the importance of grammar. But grammar is just the chisel in the hand of the sculptor. It is not the mind or hand of the sculptor. Grammar and chisel are the servants of the artist, never its master.
Grammar helps us frame our writing with consistency. Yet, we must see and understand the art of writing beyond the dancing lines of type.
Soulful Editing
Yes, by all means, spell words correctly and get rid of those nasty typos. But don’t get trapped by the sterile editing of Grammar nazis who force you into a straight jacket of conformity.
Your creativity extends beyond the text and includes your revisions and corrections. I challenge you to write 10–20 percent more of your first draft than you anticipated. Then, start chipping away to find the treasure within. Clarity is everything when sharing Christ and Christian values.
Sources cited:
Unless otherwise noted, Bible quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
