Remove Competitive Flourishes

Every sentence in a passage has a job, whether to give a fact, to land a loss, to let a joke turn or to move the reader’s eye to the next sentence. A flourish competes when it assigns the reader a different job, usually admiration. Take a sentence from a chapter about a father’s last night.

Sample (invented): My father’s breathing slowed, and the radiator ticked like a small clock counting down to a verdict nobody had the nerve to deliver.

The second clause asks the reader to admire the simile at the moment the reader should be in the room. The sentence is there to say that the breathing is slowing. The “clock” and the “verdict” tell the reader that a writer is working, and the reader looks at the writer.

On our reasoning, a reader has only so much attention for any moment, and a figure or a rhythmic display takes some. When it takes it from the thing the passage is about, the passage weakens, though the flourish may be perfect in itself.

The old advice to “kill your darlings” is usually taken to mean cut whatever you love. The phrase can be traced in print to Arthur Quiller-Couch, who gave a Cambridge lecture, “On Style,” in January 1914 and published it in On the Art of Writing (1916), where the phrase is “Murder your darlings.” Quiller-Couch has just argued that style can never be extraneous ornament, and his practical rule follows: whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it, and then delete it before the manuscript goes to press. He is aiming at what is extraneous.

The opening of Mrs. Dalloway, where Clarissa remembers opening the windows at Bourton, holds “like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave,” which on a purely informational reading is ornament on the fact that Clarissa opened a window. But the novel is about how a mind remembers, and the wave is that. Cut it and you have kept the event and lost the novel. In a lyric essay, too, a sentence that exists to be beautiful may be the reason for the essay. The same sentence can be right in one Work and wrong in another, so no rule can make this call for you. A planner may decide in advance what each passage is for and cut accordingly, and a discovery writer may write the flourish in the heat of the draft and find its fault two months later. Either way the test comes after the sentence exists.

Practice. Find the sentence in your current draft that you most want the reader to admire. You will know it: it is the one you would read aloud to a friend or quote in a query letter. Copy the passage to a separate file. Delete the sentence and read from the paragraph before to the paragraph after, aloud. Ask three questions. Does the reader lose information? Does the reader lose a feeling the passage still needs? Does a neighboring sentence now have to do what this one covered? Then decide: restore, move, or leave it out. Put the cut sentence in a salvage file; it may fit somewhere else (Practice 84). If the passage got worse without it, the sentence was working, and you can keep it without guilt. Ten minutes.