Momentum of the Muse

I picked up Fondling Your Muse by John Warner in my search for writing exercises.

While I didn’t find much helpful in that regard, it was funny. I haven’t been able to put it down, stealing paragraphs between dinner and dessert. So, I figured I would share some of his tips on editing, since recently my NaNoWriMo train got halted for a flurry of editing that should have been left for December.

The wastepaper basket is the writer’s best friend.

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you’re going to hem a pair of pants, check in with the guy who invented the sewing machine. If you’ve got a novel to edit, you should be listening to me. Besides, as you should know by now, the writer’s real best friend is this book.

So, what about editing and revising?

Do you want my advice?

My advice is not to bother. If your book is promising enough, the large publishing conglomerate will have someone revise it for you. If you’re famous, they’ll even write the entire manuscript in the first place. The truth is that most published books aren’t edited in any serious way, a fact that can be confirmed with just a cursory look at the titles found in any store. People aren’t looking for books for perfection, and most published works are riddled with inaccuracies.

For example, in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, his classic anti-hero, Hannibal Lecter, says “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.” Excuse me, but does Harris expect us to believe that Hannibal Lecter would choose the wrong wine to serve with human liver? Even small children know that a more appropriate wine with census-taker liver would be an Australian Shiraz of the Barossa Valley.

Or how about To Kill a Mockingbird, which isn’t even about a mockingbird at all, but the rape trial of a black man? That glaring error hasn’t kept the title from being one of the bestselling and most beloved books of all time.

…

Good enough is good enough, and as long as words are generally in the right order, you’ll be fine. Don’t get bogged down in the endless cycle of revision, just let it go and move on to the most important part of the whole process: selling your manuscript for as large a sum as humanly possible.

If you want a writing advice book that doesn’t help you at all, except to cheer you up about all the writing advice books that told you what you already knew but were avoiding while looking for a get-rich-quicker scheme, then this is the one.