Confessions of a Time-Saver – the toothbrush writing model
Fran Stewart works as a freelance editor by day and a mystery writer at night. Her Biscuit McKee mystery series features a small town librarian (Biscuit McKee) and the library cat (Marmalade). Fran shares her home on the backside of Hog Mountain, Georgia, with various rescued felines and donates a portion of all her book sales to humane societies and libraries. Her most recent fiction, A Slaying Song Tonight, is a standalone mystery set in the Midwest during the Depression, and her newest non-fiction is From the Tip of My Pen: a Workbook for Writers, from which her blog post today is taken.
Warning: read this between meals if you’re squeamish.
Okay. I have a confession to make. I find that I can save a lot of time if I brush my teeth in the shower. Think about it. There need be absolutely no concern over where the spit is going to land. Splashing is allowed – even encouraged. So what if I gargle and it spills over? When the shower is complete, I dry off and become respectable again.
I write the same way, and I certainly hope you’ll try it out. The process is called First Draft, Revise/Rewrite, Final Draft, Final Revision. Whew! Worrying about your first draft is like fussing if the toothpaste drops off the brush into the sink. Sure it’s hard to clean up, especially if it dries before you notice it. Big deal. Write your first draft as if you were standing in the shower and let the splashing, the fun, bubble over. The clean-up will be a breeze, I promise you.
Your dentist may have told you to start with the right upper molars and work your way methodically around the upper teeth, then repeat the process with your lower teeth. Baloney-feathers. Start wherever you want. Sometimes the first chapter I write is one that I know will come toward the end of the book. If you’re a methodical writer—chapter two is written after chapter one—okay. But splashing around a bit might free up your manuscript. It’s worth a try.
Revision is like rinsing out your mouth. Now is the time to wash away the leftover toothpaste. It should be pretty obvious what is extraneous, particularly if you’ve been reading this column for any length of time. Look for excessive adverbs, boring descriptions, lengthy back-story. Clear them out, the way you would those leftover bubbles on your chin. Is your timeline concise? Is the setting clear enough? Is each character fully dimensional? Did you buy old-fashioned toothpowder when you really wanted mint gel? Put the changes on your shopping list.
Now where does the flossing come in? Well, yes, I do that in the shower also. It saves me from the icky feeling of all that saliva dribbling down my arm, and I never have to clean speckles off the mirror. Stephen King said that you need to get to the point (I’m paraphrasing obviously) where you’re deleting perfectly good passages, since you (hopefully) eliminated all the bad ones in previous revisions. The goal is to take teeth that look perfectly clean by now and clean them up even more. Get into those hollows and fissures. Look at every scene, every set of dialogue, every aspect of each character. Are they true? Are they clean? Is there any lurking discrepancy that you can root out, like a popcorn hull that somehow cemented itself to the back of your first molar?
The final rewrite is like gargling. Inject some of those missing elements the book needs to bring it alive, to freshen up the story-line. It can be sweet-tasting or astringent, with essence of lemon or cinnamon. Decide what’s right for your mouth – and your book.
Brush, floss, gargle, and send it into the world—clean, well-dressed and ready to thrive. Don’t forget to smile.
April 20, 2010
Posted in: Guest Blogs
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2 Responses
Never thought of comparing writing to teeth brushing, but the points were well made. And I may take your tip to floss in the shower. I’m forever trying to clean my mirror. LOL
Fran, thanks so much for being my guest!
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