"Be brutal to your prose; be kind to your ideas"

On the Gentilesse of the Sword of Truth

Looking for something else, I’ve just stumbled on a quote which I copied into my habit notebook a few years ago:

‘I'm reading through the marginal comments in the manuscript from my editor at Granta. I think that “Be brutal to your prose; be kind to your ideas” may be the best bit of editorial advice ever.’

Unfortunately I didn’t note where I got this from. My bad, and if any lovely Itch readers know who said or wrote it, do please say so in the comments and I can reference it properly.

Long-term Itch readers will know that I deeply dislike the ‘if it ain’t hurting, it ain’t working’ school of rhetoric: the idea that anything which wasn’t agony to write is ‘worthless fluff’ to read. This definitely worth-ful image is of dandelion fluff, let it be said:

I also deeply dislike the equivalent rhetoric about feedback. As I said a decade ago, in Feedback, Humility and the Sword of Truth,

there is no inherent merit, no virtue, no bravery and no use in being brutal for its own sake. ‘This is rubbish, you fool’ is no more useful to the writer than ‘This is wonderful, darling’. If anything, it's marginally less useful because it damages the writer's confidence, and un-confident writers don't dare do the things which would make their writing stand out.

It is, of course, true that writers frequently have to murder their darlings and it may take their writers-circle mates to point those out. Editors frequently have to say, ‘This doesn’t work. You’re going to have to change it before readers will want it.’ And any of these may send the writer off to lick their wounds for a while, before deciding what to do about it all.

But one thing I love about the quote at the top is that it’s about process, not product. In all creative work, if you can get your process right - figure out the best means of seeking, combining and growing your materials into a new thing - the outcome is almost sure to be a good one. That’s the case even if the work goes in a direction you didn’t expect: any good creative process will allow for your editorial, organising left-brain knowing when to out of your right-brain’s creative, free-form way - and when to step back into the arena.

The other thing I love about the quote is that it gets specific. As I read it, it’s saying that your idea is what matters. After all, it’s the mainspring of why you’re bothering to write this line or paragraph or story in the first place. But for the idea to reach the reader’s mind and flourish there, you will need to be entirely ruthless about the words that embody the idea and enable it to travel. The words are not the reason for the piece to exist, if you like: they need to earn their keep on the page by being the best words for conveying what you want to communicate.

So when something in your novel doesn’t work, many editors will suggest you cut it, but really good editors will ask, ‘What were you trying to do?’ And with luck, as you start explain (if only to yourself), it’ll start to come clear whether it is actually an idea worth keeping in the story.

As anyone caring for children knows, kindness is not the same as permissiveness or laxity, and you may well have to rethink your idea at least to some degree. But once what you’re trying to do is clear, and clearly the right thing, you can get ruthless with how its embodiment in words needs to be changed. Maybe the changing will be brutal: the sword of truth may be pointing and then chopping at vocabulary, grammar and syntax, length, placing in the text …

But as you reconsider every aspect of how it’s written, the idea itself is your lodestone. At the risk of getting a bit Arthurian, when your sword of truth’s ruthlessness with words is matched by its gentilesse towards your ideas, your story has a good chance of growing into a true product of your creative self.

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Image by Briam Cute from Pixabay