Category: Improving What You Have Written

Imagine a flavorful stew. Bobbing around in a spicy broth might be chunks of meat, carrots, potatoes (not too soft), celery, onion. Perhaps, once-frozen peas or kernels of corn. Turnips (if you like them) and a few cloves of garlic. Banana slices. Cubes of toasted pumpernickel. Jellied moose nose. Coral worms and circus peanuts to intensify the taste.

Wait! What? You might be trying to thwart a gag reflex after reading the last few ingredients in this “flavorful” stew. Reading a sentence stew can be as revolting. Few authors set out to write a sentence stew, but they may end up doing so for several reasons, feeling queasy as they add each ingredient.

A sentence stew is a paragraph (stew) of sentences (ingredients) that should never be combined (nor, in some cases, consumed separately).

Occasionally, as a writer you might want to yell about how sick you are of words, especially if you must find the right word “all day through” just to inch your manuscript into the next sentence or paragraph. Eliza Doolittle in the 1964 filmed musical My Fair Lady sang I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through though she was not a writer. In fact, phonetics Professor Henry Higgins was trying to liberate her from the Cockney accent that identified her as a flower seller in Covent Garden, and she was sick of repeating “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain” and other ditties. Most writers, like the late Robert MacNeil, are crazy about words. This blog is about choosing the right words.

Most writers dislike revising and editing. If you haven’t reached this stage in the writing process, you may be dreading it. If you have, you may dislike it as much as most writers. Or you may be like me. I enjoy this part of the process because it means that I have written something. I’m not staring at a blank page. I have something to work with, something I can improve. During most of the writing process, I do not see very clearly. Writing is like making my way through fog. I can’t do much to make the fog disappear. All I can do is lurch through the murkiness waiting for the fog to part itself and reveal some clear sky. Once I have a complete draft – notice I did not claim it was perfect – I see some blue sky for the rest of my work.