Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 11: Trimming

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 11: Trimming

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/08/08/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-11-trimming/

Key points: Trimming takes fat out so that you say what you need to say in the best possible way. Trimming improves the pace, makes writing snappy, and helps with clarity. Killing your darlings is not trimming. Trim repetition. Trim false starts. One strategy is section by section trimming -- 10% off each page or chapter, aka Jerry Pournelle's cut. Another approach is spot trimming, focusing on scenes, aka Dan and the Writing Group take a slice. Poetry teaches word usage. Trim adjectives, very, dialogue tags, navelgazing. Fix passive voice.
( 1 Lightyear: 10 to the 13th KM. About 63,000 AU, which is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun. )

[Brandon] The writing prompt is you are going LARPing with Jerry Pournelle. If you have to look up LARP, go ahead. If you have to find out what Jerry Pournelle is like, go ahead and Google that. Write a story that involves you LARPing with Jerry Pournelle. Not Howard LARPing with Jerry Pournelle, because he has already appeared in too many of our writing prompts.
[Dan] Then cut it down to half size.
[Brandon] Jerry Pournelle or the story?
[Dan] Something in the story has to be cut in half.
[Howard] Do you have any idea how big a light year is?
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

Lest We Forget...

Now that was odd. A couple of Japanese are biking around Europe on TV, and they wandered into a small town in Czechoslovakia. Where they found a paper store with handmade paper. Among the items for sale was an odd newspaper kind of thing. They asked what this was, and learned that the owner had made paper and done one page at a time silk screening of underground news when the Communists were in charge and such newspapers were crimes.

Think about making the paper, then printing each page one at a time by hand - with the knowledge that getting caught would be severely punished.  That's commitment.