A Different Kind of Whittling

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.  ^__ Robert Cormier

Last time here on my journal I talked about whittling – the real kind of whittling where you take a pocketknife to a piece of wood. But there are other sorts of whittling and one of them is what I’m doing this week.

I had that deadline for my Christmas Shaker book that kept my fingers attached to my keyboard for several days straight as I tried to race to the end of my story. I did find the end finally with a couple of days to try to make the words sing a little sweeter tune. A couple of days are not enough. Especially when I knew I was too wordy. It seems wrong somehow to be working so hard to dig enough words out of your head to try to get a story down and then realize that you’ve dug up too many words.

 

Sometimes editors don’t mind a few extra words, but Christmas books are different. They need those stories to follow the length guidelines a little closer. I knew the story was coming in too long. I even pulled out my contract to see what the word requirements were – 50,000 to 55,000. To give this a little perspective, most of my recent books have come in at over 100,000 words. Sometimes 120,000. I love words and it takes a lot of them for me to tell a story. So even with the knowledge that I was over my contracted word length, I had to keep writing in order to finish the story. I couldn’t worry about how long it was until I got it written. I trimmed a few words here and there, but the deadline came and I sent the story in.

 

Happily, my first reader, my editor likes the story. That’s always good news. But she did notice those extra words. So now I have a new deadline to find and eliminate the unnecessary words. Tighten. Rephrase. Make better. The delete key is my best tool right now. So I’m whittling out the extra words to make a cleaner, slimmer story. Not as much fun as whittling a piece of wood, but maybe more fun than trying to whittle down a waistline by not eating all the good stuff there is out there to eat.

 

I don’t really mind editing. I sort of like it if I’m not having to totally change the story. This time I don’t have to do that. I just have to hunt down those extra words and whittle them away, one by one. Or sometimes a sentence or paragraph at a time. Good words that I thought were needed on the first run through of the story, but everything can be made better. The delete key works. 1,000 or so down. 500 to go.

 

Do you need to whittle down something in your life?

 

 

Whittling in the Mountains

 Have you ever done any whittling? Do you even know what it means to whittle? I suppose a whittler could be making something out of the stick of wood he's working over with a knife, but most of the time when a person is whittling, he's just making wood shavings. Men are the ones I usually see working their knives on a piece of wood, but women can whittle too. I've even curled a few shavings off a piece of wood at times when one of my sons wanted to show off a new pocket knife. 

Do you have a pocket knife? For years, my mother had a miniature pocket knife about the size of a one inch safety pin in her coin purse. While a pocket knife is optional for a country girl, it's almost as necessary as a comb to a country boy. Maybe more so. And for men who have reached the "let's tell some stories" age, it's indispensable. It keeps a man's hands busy and his eyes occupied, but his ears are ready to listen. Plus, he can just think better when his hands are occupied. 

It's almost a cliche to mention older men sitting on a bench outside a store talking and whittling away the afternoons. Those men have made many an appearance in books, movies, and t.v. shows. The image brings to mind a simpler time when life moved slower. Now we're more apt to see men and women sitting with their phones in their hands checking out what's going on all around the world instead of just watching what might be passing on the street in front of them while the wood shavings pile up around their feet. But is that progress? Well, maybe. At least for me. I'd probably just shave my finger with a whittling knife, but I can take pictures with the phone to share the places I've been. 

This week we went on our annual trip with my husband's brothers and sister and their spouses to the Smoky Mountains. The weather was gorgeous, the leaves colorful, the food good and the company the best. A great way to catch up with what's going on with our families. And the guys did a little tale telling and whittling. 

Thanks for reading, and now that I'm back from the mountains, I'll get those books sent out to the winners of my giveaway.