This will be a short post today as I have a stupid, stupid cold with bronchitis and am sitting here miserably eating chicken soup. However…

I’ve been think a lot recently about the old ‘using the right words versus over-descriptiveness’, which for me is something that only half comes into play on first draft. Most of my condensing and restructuring (so that everything doesn’t read like a flowery rambling run-on) happens in editing. But when I’m in either the writing or editing process, I like to read books and authors that I know are skilled at word choice and the economy of words, so I can get my head in the zone. This time round, I read some Lovecraft, and as expected, had a moment of ‘That’s the way you do it.’

‘And yet I saw them in a limitless stream – flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating, surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare.’

This is from The Shadow over Innsmouth of course. Upon reading that passage, I couldn’t help thinking that I probably would have taken two entire paragraphs to describe this scene. AT LEAST. I like to think I would have condensed it in the editing stage, but suspect my version would still have been longer and less refined.

But reading authors with the right stuff is one of those things you can do while writing or editing to put you in the appropriate mindset, so you take a moment and say to yourself…could I have made my manuscript, that paragraph, that sentence, that WORD better? And the answer is usually a resounding yes.

And now, I need to go over-medicate my cold and blow my nose because I’m starting to look like Cthulhu.