There is a healthy amount of overlap between gardeners and writers. Beatrix Potter, Emily Dickinson, George Bernard Shaw, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Daphne du Maurier were all digging way in their gardens when they weren’t putting words on the page.
At first glance these seem to be very different pastimes, but, on closer inspection, you can see how much the writing process is similar to growing a garden. And if any activity is like weed pulling, its editing your work.
Weeding is essential to a healthy garden in order to let the desired plants grow properly and to keep the overall garden in an accessible order. Many gardeners argue the best way to weed is hand weeding, getting down on hands and knees and eye-to-eye with each individual plant, rather than relying on chemical sprays or industrial machinery.
So too in the editing process, you have to look at each sentence, every word, examining them to see what belongs and what needs to be pulled out, rather than just relying on an overall check by AI software.
Just as the dandelions and thistles are easy to spot as needing removal, the weeds to pull out in the first pass of the editing process often stand out – the overabundance of adverbs, clunky exposition, or purple-prose descriptors.
There is also often a need to reduce the overall count of words when publishers have a hard-stop maximum word count. “Kill your darlings” is the oft repeated advise because that’s what it can feel like to the author when forced to make cuts to a story.
Tamara Pierce stills moans about an entire subplot concerning giraffes she had to cut out from one of her books to keep it under a certain word count.
Louisa May Alcott described her avatar Jo March making the edits that her publisher required to her first full-length manuscript as: “So, with Spartan firmness, the young authoress laid her first-born on her table, and chopped it up as ruthlessly as any ogre.”
Just as the overly empathetic gardener can feel bad over pulling out unneeded plants, so too can the author feel about cutting unneeded words.
Everything in the final draft should belong in the story, serving multiple purposes in terms of plot, world building and characterization, just as every individual plant in the garden after weeding should be on purpose and planned out to serve the overall composite.
But after weeding, comes the really hard part of trimming. You know a particular shrub or bush belongs in the garden, but now it’s a question of which leaf and branches to cut off in order to make sure the individual plant is both healthy as well as serving the whole in overall structure and aesthetic of the garden.
Line by line, word by word, pass after pass and draft after draft takes place to snip out the tiniest excess, to make sure the right words are allowed to shine and draw the readers’ attention, just as some leaves need to be removed to let the flowers blossom.
This might all be a rather tortured metaphor for the revision stage of writing, but I think it shows just how important the right cuts can be to make a story flourish.
And yes, I am writing this to procrastinate on cutting out words from a story I am editing, however did you know?
Kara Race-Moore Writes More 