What does one do on the 25th day of Nano? Cut concrete of course.After three major floods this year, I decided I had to get an extra grate across my six-metre wide driveway to channel water away from the house. My wonderful neighbour, PJ, suggested we could do it cheaper ourselves.
I said okay.
I mean how hard can it be, right?
Doesn’t the saw do all the work? (The saw and PJ, that is!)
The answer is YES and NO. After the cutting comes cracking up the concrete, carting the concrete away and mixing fresh concrete to put back in around the grate – great! While I wasn’t writing for the six-hour marathon effort, I did think about writing – in particular the next phase of my ms – the editing.
I thought, which one is harder – cutting concrete or cutting words?
We took a perfectly good driveway, cut holes in it, smashed it with a sledgehammer and chucked out what felt like 10,000 lumps of concrete. I found this task physically exhausting, but emotionally I was fine – after all I wasn’t attached to the concrete bits, they weren’t needed anymore, they served no purpose and they had to go, or else clutter my lovely front garden.
But ask me to destroy a perfectly good ms and cut 10,000 words – words I have lovingly crafted into picturesque prose, rephrasing, restructuring and replacing over and over until it sings to me in a united and harmonious voice, I’d rather go outside and cut concrete.
It’s definitely easier.
Hi Jenn
How long does this nano thing go for? Cutting concrete sounds like a cinch in comparison.
Best of luck.
Shayne
Um, yes cutting concrete would be a lot easier than cutting words from a Manuscript. After all it's your baby.
Oh and the words you cut, save in case you need them later. I never throw anything away.
Sandie
Urgh! Tell me about it. Been there multiple times (cutting words, not cutting concrete!).
The only advice I can give you (well, it's Anna Jacob's advice, really)is to set the ms aside for several months, write another book or two and then come back and read it. Suddenly you'll find it easy to cull words because you'll be looking at it like a reader. All that indulgent prose, all those redundant scenes you worked so hard on, will just seem plain boring.
But you probably know that already!