Tuesday, May 11, 2010

"The human brain moves faster...

"The human brain moves faster than any author's fingers can type" (Donald Maass).

Ha. I was reading The Fire in Fiction by Maass this morning while walking on the treadmill and I loved this quote. It makes me laugh now as I type - why? Because apparently it is a challenge for me to use a highligher while walking on the treadmill. HA ha. You should see the yellow squiggle line across the page from trying to highlight this sentence.

Anyhoo... The point of the quote is to cut the unnecessary words from your manuscript. Cut the stuff people don't want to read (an "important" person said that one, but I can't remember who it was).

Sometimes as writers we think all of our words are important, but they're not. The trick is to keep our voice and say the important things with the least amount of words possible.

So, with that, I'll stop typing.

1 comment:

  1. My first MS started out at 234,000 words. Now it's around 105,000 words. Talk about overindulgence!

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