The book I’m trying to finish refuses to cooperate. Some sections at the end drag, no matter what I do. This weekend I devised a strategy that helped. It might work for you, too.
The book, “Revenge of the Pond Scum,” describes my journey trying to learn what causes Alzheimer’s and ALS. By “journey” I mean reading books and scientific articles on the Internet and trying to translate them into normal English. As I started out, the project seemed reasonably easy because, after all, it was about my favorite subject: me. Before I knew much about the topic, it was easy to write conversational sections about what transpired in my life and how that related to the quest.
As I got deeper, my brain became full of facts, opinions and theories from a huge range of disciplines. I learned about cyanobacteria (hence the book’s title) and fruit bats, fungi, herbicides, insecticides, excitotoxins, superoxide dismutase, inflammatory responses and the diseases caused by vitamin deficiencies. I wanted to include as much of this cool information as I could.
Some of it even felt like new connections no one else had made. For example, believe it or not, I don’t think anyone else has described the possible role of the rotenone in derris root as a contributing factor of lytco-bodig disease on Guam. If I’m right about that, obviously, I can’t edit it out even though it may not fascinate you. I certainly couldn’t edit out the role of thiamine and hydrogen sulfide. But jamming all that stuff into one book made for some boring sections. Finally I decided to just live with that. It’s a short book, no law compels anyone to read every single word. But it bothers me.
As a compromise, I invented a writing trick. I scrolled through the problem sections and stopped at a random paragraph. Without the distracting context of the surrounding text, I examined that one paragraph for flaws. Did I slip into awkward syntax? Did I rely too heavily on easy, passive verbs? Did each sentence carry its own weight? Or could some of them be excised, even if they contained facts I personally thought were cool, without harming the paragraph?
This little tactic helped me a lot. I realized that some of the “boring” parts felt that way because they contained information that simply didn’t fit. Interesting stuff to me, but not important to the point of the chapter. They distracted. Because the writing itself wasn’t bad, and the information was cool, it felt wasteful to delete them. I’m a verbal hoarder.
So I cut them and pasted them into my separate text document of notes. I did not kill them, I just transported them to a new home where they can prance and cavort with other orphaned sentences. Knowing they’re happy, I feel better about removing them from their original environment.
And readers won’t have to step around them to walk through the book.
