Guest Blogs
Vincent Lam
How to Ditch A Thousand Pages of Writing
First off, decide to write a novel.
If your goal is to jettison approximately a thousand – give or take a few hundred – pages of your own written words, I recommend making the solemn and irrevocable decision to write a novel. Whether your genre is science fiction, historical fiction, crime fiction, or that ethereal mess called literary fiction, I think this is a good first step. It may be possible to achieve this same extravagance of waylaid words writing a graduate thesis or technical manual, but thankfully I have no experience in those realms so I will confine my advice to something I have written, a novel.
Secondly, begin to write. Begin where it seems to begin in your heart. That may be with plot, or with character, or perhaps with a flowery and overly wrought scene-setting exercise. It may be that you start with (what you think is) an especially brilliant snippet of dialogue or (what seems at the time to be) a dynamic sequence that should lock any reader into your book. Begin not with fear, not with trepidation, but with hubris. Do not spare even one nanosecond, not even a picosecond, worrying about whether or not you have started at the correct place. Why worry? You will almost surely discard this writing. Hey, if you want to ditch a thousand pages of writing, you have to start somewhere.
Thirdly, continue to write. Hubris! Hubris! Hubris!
For now.
Let the drafting of your oeuvre proceed in the mostly wildly abandoned manner, a lascivious embrace with language. Tap! Tap! Tap! Scrawl away! Allow the dreams to proceed into ink, the visions to concretize themselves in kilobytes, the hyperboles to hyperbolize. Give your characters free rein to express their most dramatic impulses, connive and inscribe the most intricate possible circuitous plots twists (Aha, reader! Gotcha again!), use adverbs in order to give greater velocity to the sorry little verbs, allow metaphors to carry your brilliance aloft like gilded chariots of prose, never fear the adjective because when you are writing something of such force and vigor it should not lack for descriptors, allow bantering repetitive dialogue to be accentuated with the force of pauses and deep sighs that are clearly signaled in the text or by lengthy interstitial (or something that approximates it) passages that describe the speakers’ fluctuations of breathing or perhaps their lips’ trembling, or their tortured gazes, the delicate shuffling of their feet, and (oh by the way) eschew conventions of grammar and writing – for example – allowing yourself to indulge in ridiculous run-on sentences that could not be tolerated in a writer of lesser merit.
After all, you must produce the thousand pages if you wish to burn them.
What do you have? A good start.
