Here’s the trick, here’s the “skinny:” If you love a particular line or phrase, if you’re coddling a particular scene or character, then you have to give these prized precious things a nice shove…into rush-hour traffic. Kill these things, swiftly, with no remorse and move on.
It is in human nature to protect something or someone you love, but as a writer, you are truly doing your writing a disservice by holding on to it indefinitely. It has been a hard lesson for me to learn, but I am learning it, however slowly.
A trick I play on myself occasionally is “opposite day.” If my first instinct is to give a character a night off, some warm milk and a night in front of the television, then my opposite day instinct is to have the character be car-jacked and mugged and thwacked on the head, metaphorically speaking. And those moments when I actually force myself to do those things to my “pearls” of language or characters, I always get something better than I could have imagined. My results are always a pleasant surprise.
But it is also human nature to fight change, and that’s why it’s taken me so many years to even admit that often I horde my precious words and sometimes, only sometimes, do I try to break free.
Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, an M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan, is working on a couple of novels and is in her first week of the second year of her art-a-day challenge. Check it out on Facebook.