Be Your Own Editor

Thanks to all of you who submitted responses to my writing exercise. As a reminder, the instructions were to tell the following story in just three paragraphs:

A woman rushing to an appointment has a fender-bender, resulting in her meeting an intriguing man.

I received dozens of imaginative and intriguing efforts, but the following story emerged as my favorite. Nice writing, Lucy from Santa Barbara! Lucy will be receiving a free copy of Alice McDermott’s lovely new novel After This.

Let’s look at Lucy’s short story:

Perry hurried along the shoulder of Route 9 carrying her four-inch heels. Could she open her briefcase, remove her notes for the Ever-Brite Toothpaste presentation, and review them without missing a stride? Probably not. She’d been practicing the presentation in her car and knew it needed one final element. An image. A hook. A spokesperson.

But then that bastard in the Volvo had nicked her from behind and sped away, leaving Perry’s fender on the pavement and Perry footing it to the Ever-Brite offices. She brainstormed with herself: Teeth. White. Gleam! Nothing.

She’d left her fender behind with the rest of her car to wait two hours for the AAA tow truck. Perry couldn’t wait with it. She would walk the remaining mile, make her presentation without that missing element, and then take a taxi back to meet the tow truck. As she congratulated herself on her perseverance in the face of life’s harsh realities, a man in a suit pulled up alongside her and rolled down the window of his Lexus. “Can I help you?” he said, with a wide, black-toothed smile.

What do I like about this story? First, its economical word choice. Some of you wrote stories of only three sentences. Making every word count is the right idea, but being concise in your word choice doesn’t necessarily mean writing something as short as possible. A five-hundred-page novel can be less wordy than one badly written paragraph. The above story isn’t perfect, but it has a few key elements of good writing missing from almost every other submission:

• Use of strong nouns and verbs. This story uses nouns and verbs to describe the characters and situation, rather than strings of adjectives and adverbs. Did you even notice the lack of a physical description of Perry? I’ll guess “no,” because your imagination formulated its own image of her.
• Writing “outside the box.” In every other story, without exception, the “intriguing man” was either the driver of the other car or a police officer. Original, memorable writing and rewriting requires the ability to free your imagination from the constraints of cliche and predictability.
• Lack of extraneous information. Read the story again and see if you can remove any sentence without also removing information necessary to the story and its effect. While reading most of your stories, I found myself thinking at least once, “Why did I need to know this?”

Thanks again to every writer who participated! I’ll continue to post more contests, exercises, and opportunities for you to share your thoughts and experiences on writing. In the meantime, I’ll send each writer who took the time to do this exercise a brief critique. If you have any comments or additional feedback on Lucy’s story, please post a comment below!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Writing Contests & Exercises. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.