What Passes for Flashes of Brilliance
I don't think I'm a wonderful writer, or necessarily even a very good one, though I may be on the way to becoming a publishable writer. The most common types of compliment I've gotten about my writing over the years is that my prose is smooth, coherent, and sometimes gorgeous/beautiful. Mostly I think I just kind of hump along, writing my stuff and (slowly, hopefully) getting better. Rare is the day when I have a moment when I'm really excited about something I just thought to do.
This afternoon I had a good moment, and it was caused by the usual thing that causes substantial improvement in my writing: subtraction. For the past week I've been revising a short story I wrote something like four years ago. It's been pleasant to work on because I re-examined it a few weeks back and was pleasantly surprised. Most everything else from that period except for a few poems has gone to the proverbial trunk where old writing goes to die. At any rate, I was revising it, having trouble with a knotty section smack dab in the middle... and realized that the answer was subtraction. The excision of nearly a fifth of the story made the whole fall almost completely in line with what I was trying to do plot- and theme-wise.
I had been working for a few hours and gotten most of the rest of the story up to snuff (for this draft, anyway) but been unable to decide what to do with the middle section. I went out to slump on the couch and eat some Triscuits and as I crunched I went through various ideas: the woman dies suddenly, he sees her shadow as she's stripping for her boss, he returns from lunch and finds she's wearing a different outfit, etc. When I decided to chop the scene out, it was like I finally set down the bags of sand I'd been carrying. The scene was really the last remnant from the old version of the story, when it was overtly surreal instead of covertly so, and it made sense to let it go.