At the risk of seeming obsessed with George Saunders's elaborate and sometimes product-placement-riddled metaphors about writing (and who can resist stoves and hotwheels?), I wanted to share this morsel from his interview with James Schiff, distributed in the Thursday night story workshop by the wonderful Laurie Sleeper:
We have at our house one of those glass-topped stoves--the only way you can tell it's hot is that it glows red. With writing, it seems to me, you have your eyes closed, and you're passing your hand over the stove, trying to feel where the hot spots are. My thought is that you trust the hot spots. Don't even think about anything else. Look for the place where the prose energy is high. Cut away the other stuff--be brave enough to do that. This accomplishes two things: it compresses the piece, and it creates little places for new text to join... [If] I revise in a certain spirit, in time the story puts itself back together the way I think it maybe was originally. It's mostly looking at the story and saying, 'These three pages don't do anything--they're boring," so I cut them. Don't worry about what's going to happen--just cut it. Don't worry about how much you loved it when you wrote it--cut it."
I would add to that only this: "Don't worry about how much your workshop member(s) loved it--cut it."
He continues:
Somtimes you have fragments lying around, and you don't know how they're connected. As long as you trust the hot spots, you'll have in time a bulk of text that doesn't suck, and the plot comes out of that. How do these three non-sucky parts fit together? For me it's great, because you don't have to worry about it. You just have to maintain your standards, keep cutting, and in time the story will reveal itself." --George Saunders
