Learning to Trim Unnecessary Words
Answer Sheet to Exercise in Tightening Your Creative Writing
In Learn to Cut Unnecessary Words, the first article in this series of three, you were asked to read the extract, and to:
- Identify what actions are necessary to the plot.
- Identify the mood of the scene.
- In a few words describe the relationship between Marcie and Tom.
- In a few words describe the place where the interaction takes place.
Below are the answers.
Actions Necessary to the Plot:
Marcie asks Tom why he is late. This makes Tom angry. He throws his keys onto the table, and snaps at her. Marcie tells him he missed an important event. She cries, which angers him even more. He is cold and humiliates her. Enraged by his rejection, Marcie cuts his tie off with a pair of scissors. He reveals he was saving a baby's life.
The Mood :
The mood is confrontational, highly emotional, intense and stressed.
The Relationship between the Characters:
Marcie is angry when Tom comes home. He becomes angry at her attack. He acts out his anger. She responds by blaming him and crying. He rejects her because he can’t stand tears. This makes her even angrier, and she cuts off his tie. He then guilts her into feeling bad. Their relationship is dysfunctional and is based on not listening or respecting one another.
The Scene:
The scene takes place in the hallway of the house. They are obviously well off – Tom is a doctor, it seems, and the marble table and chintz covered rubbish bin, as well as the expensive designer dog and Dior silk tie suggest wealth.
Read the Extract Again.
“Where have you been?” Marcie’s eyebrows lifted into a sardonic arch as Tom walked in the front door, definitely the worse for wear.
Tom’s face changed from an expression of exhaustion to one of intense rage. He threw his keys onto the hall table. They slid across the smooth marble surface and fell with a clatter into the chintz-covered rubbish bin, knocking it over so it released its contents all over the terracotta tiled floor.
“What’s it to you?” he asked, running his hand through his curly hair with the receding hairline.
Marcie sighed as she picked up the rubbish bin and packed back into it the empty battery wrapping, a pile of junk mail and a half chewed hoof that Frodo, the Weimareiner, had left on the doorstep.
“I’ve been waiting for two hours. You missed the twins’ concert.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she fiddled in her sleeve for the tissue she’d tucked there that morning.
“Here,” Tom said coldly, pulling a pack of pocket tissues from his coat. “Blow your nose on this. And then go and make yourself presentable. Put on some lipstick or something, and clean off your mascara. You look so ugly when you cry, like a decomposing racoon.”
At this humiliating comment by her husband, deep inside her chest something snapped in Marcie’s breast. Her eyes searched left and right, up and down, desperately seeking a weapon, anything … At last her eyes alighted on the dressmaking scissors Dorothy, the older of the twins by three minutes, the one who was good at arts and crafts, had left on the table.
She darted forward and grabbed the scissors, inserting her thumb and fingers into the green rubbered holes of the handle. Then she spun on her heel, and turned to face him.
Tom’s face blanched as he saw the weapon in her hand. “No, no, Marcie, I beg you…” he uttered, clutching his hands to his throat.
But Marcie was ruthless. She darted forward, seized his Dior silk tie, and snipped it off, half way up, just past the little logo that said Dior.
“I’ll teach you to cheat on me!”
“If you have to know why I’m late,” Tom said coldly, “I was saving an unborn twenty eight week gestation baby’s life.”
Exercise 2
Cut and paste the extract above into a new document, and edit out every word, phrase or sentence which:
- is not essential to the action,
- does not build mood, does not build the setting,
- does not show the characters or the relationship between characters.
You will find the answers to this exercise in the next article in the series: Exercises in Cutting Creative Writing
Editing Your Book
|
More in Writing & Publishing
Latest Articles