7/7/2024 0 Comments Pulling Weeds![]() Gardening requires weeding. Writing requires editing, and something more. My container garden doesn't need much weeding. The boxes, tubs, and pots are a controlled environment. A few weeds arrive airborne, or come in the potting mix. My remaining in-ground garden beds can run rampant with weeds if I don't stay on top of things. What are weeds? Welcome in one environment, a flower, groundcover, or grass becomes a weed when it pops up among the vegetables, herbs, or flowers you deliberately planted. Mint is a fine example. It tends to be invasive. You plant it on one side of the garden bed, and it sends runners under and over ground to establish new colonies wherever it pleases. I grow mint. Where I want it, mint is a wonderfully useful herb. When it invades the tomatoes, it's a weed. Now to writing. When does "weeding" come into play? Not too long ago, people wrote entire novels on typewriters. I'll sometimes jot ideas or preliminary outlines with pen and notepad. But I primarily write fiction on a laptop computer. In the olden days, authors could tell you how many drafts their novel went through before completion. My writing friends have mused about the impossibility of counting drafts when you create on a computer. I typically have several versions of a novel-in-progress labeled first draft, with later copies labeled with the month and year, or the date I began that revision. Each version involved editing during the process of creation. I won't discuss all the levels of editing. Here's a good introduction on the Writer's Digest blog. The article discusses editing in the context of hiring someone to do it for you. Most of us are doing nearly every stage ourselves, or with the help of unpaid critique partners and beta readers. What part of writing a novel involves "weeding"? All stages, I would argue. The writer searches for that which does not belong here. It may be perfectly okay in another part of the novel, or another work entirely. But not here. In the YA my daughter and I are co-authoring, we're yanking out by the roots passive voice and weak action. Wording that was fine in early versions, when we had to get the first draft hammered out, is now a weed. As an example, we noticed a pattern of using "was." Perfectly fine in most cases when used as an auxiliary verb, "was" more often diluted the sense of urgency in our story. Instead of "he was going," say "he went." She was climbing becomes she climbed. When you know what to look for, those weeds begin to pop out at you. Other weeds were long introductory scenes we later realized weren't needed in the book. Entire paragraphs have been slashed. Even secondary characters have been removed. There are many more weeds to pull. My shameful garden bed is in transition to something entirely different. I'll whack those weeds out with a hoe before they get worse. Perhaps we'll make it over into a flower bed next year. The YA novel is now with beta readers. They will find more weeds for us to pull, helping us to make the book better. Weeding gardens, writing, or life in general is an on-going process. Instead of treating it like a dreaded chore, try approaching it as a chance to make things more beautiful and less complicated.
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