The 10% Rule

Confession: When I finish a draft, I think it's perfect. It usually takes 3 days of objectivity to convince me I was completely wrong.

Reading:

• Master of the Cauldron, by David Drake

Writing:

• "Illuminated"

Yesterday I did my big push to edit the first 24 pages of "Illuminated." I got through about 20, which was great, because I'm going to completely rework the last scene preparatory to the final passages. Doing the revision helped in several ways, because I was able to start to work in some thematic elements that I didn't even think of while initially composing.

I can thank Stephen King for that... praise for On Writing is justified, in my opinion. He also mentioned one other rule, the 10% rule. Essentially, the idea is to cut out about 10% of the volume of a draft.

I realize now that I've been doing that by necessity with the stories I submit to the 24 Hour Short Story Contest. The word count is always just a few hundred words less than my first draft, so I wind up going through sentence by sentence to rephrase, trim, snip, delete, edit, etc. In the most extreme cases, I have to lose entire passages. What's left is usually a much leaner story than I would normally write, and you know what? That's a good thing.

Not to imply that I have verbal diarrhea, but I'm all to prone to use a fifteen-word clause where a single adjective will do. I think that's because the composition, in my head, is being generated in a certain order, and my brain is converting those thoughts to language in the same order. So if I think of a woman, then think that she's beautiful, I'll probably write "the woman, whom he thought was very beautiful" instead of "he thought the woman was beautiful," or even "the beautiful woman...." (Hell, if it's from "his" POV, I don't need to specify that he's the one thinking that, right?)

Those are revisions that only become apparent when the brain is going through a completely different process. Composing is take thoughts and converting them to words. Revision is the process of making sure that the words can be reconverted into the proper thoughts. I don't think it's really possible to do both of those at once, which is why revision is so important. The 10% rule, then, becomes a rule of thumb that pinpoints one way to achieve that... using stronger language.

I guess by that I mean "content" language. Words like "of" and "that" and "it" lack content, so why not replace them with a word that will work for you?