A deep motive for making literature or art of any sort is the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what might otherwise seem a mass of senseless rubble. —Iris Murdoch
The most difficult task of a writer is to view one’s own work objectively. We are biased by attachment to our original inspiration and creative prose, aghast at the admonition to “kill your darlings.” But we must keep the end in mind: engaging readers, who will (like it or not) approach our work with their own tastes and filters.
How, then, to view our own work dispassionately, to select and edit with the end goal in mind?
I faced the same obstacle when selecting tracks to share from musical jam session recordings. I could narrow down to the “top 40” easily enough; but I was stumped at how to select with more refinement, for an album or single release– especially as different band members held different criteria for the quality of tunes we were aiming for.
Finally it occurred to me to set up a ranking system, where I could assign a number value (1, 2, or 3) in each of six criteria, for a given song: length, story, structure, dance, original, energy. Using an Excel spreadsheet, it was easy then to calculate the totals and arrive at short list of the “best” songs with these desired qualities. (You can hear the results on Soundcloud!)
Back to the long-suffering memoir project, I kept getting feedback to prune the opening chapters, chock full of precious nuggets from my lost youth. Unable to wield the knife with any conviction, I needed an expanded toolkit. Voila! The music rating system would serve just fine.
I had to adapt it, of course, to suit the criteria I targeted in My Generation. So I had six different theme categories, all central to my story (home, love, nature, freedom, self/death, and world). Action (including dialogue) plays a key role too; plus emotion, commentary from the future self, and placement in the structural form I have adopted the work. That made ten criteria, easy enough to calculate in a spreadsheet. Now better scenes emerged from the rubble; inferior scenes sank into gray highlighting, for likely deletion.
The advantage (or the curse) of editing writing compared to selection of music is that the inferior material need not be discarded outright. Analyzing the criteria scores showed me where it needed more work… perhaps just a sentence or two added to supply a missing ingredient.
Still the contest was close between many of the scenes, so I needed a tiebreaker. I added criteria for voice, profluence, and texture. I gave bonus points (or deductions) based on earlier feedback from a developmental editor. Most of the scenes making the final cut scored high (between 20 and 34); most of the cuts had low scores. There were exceptions: a couple of scenes, rated high at 27, but which I decided just didn’t contribute enough to the central thrust of my story, or which mattered more to my memories than to what readers would find relevant. So for the next chapter, I will give weight to these additional criteria. [Postscript: applying these last filters to a final read-through of the chapter I was working on produced quick and dramatic cuts, finally achieving the 50 percent reduction I was hoping for. Which tells me these last two criteria are the ones that really count. But maybe to get there I had to go through the preliminary exercise.]
Obviously what works best for one project or writer will vary for another. You might decide a simplified approach works best: ranking, say, for Action/Dialogue, Voice/Emotion, Senses/World. If nothing else, using a quasi-scientific system like this can point you to improve your writing in any of the areas important to its success. In the end, as always, it’s your call.
Look for the upcoming release of Nowick Gray’s memoir of the Baby Boom, My Generation.
Enjoy the all-improvised grooves of the jam band Aquarius Victoria on Soundcloud.