When my story has a powerful phrase but that loses its power when I read it again in the next day, should I keep it or remove it?

+1 Mark, delete it. Make sure you have a backup of your manuscript for the day, you won't lose it. Then delete it and try something else.

Psychologically speaking, a major problem for writers is our own short-term memories and a heavily biased "moment" of how we perceive the real world and the world and characters we are writing. So when a phrase seems brilliant to us, it is often because we are relying on a state of mind or remembered circumstances that is NOT produced by the writing on the page.

It is kind of the "inside joke" phenomenon, without realizing you are telling an inside joke: The context of the brilliance was in your head, not on the page, and by the time you came back and read it: The context inside your head had dissipated, replaced by a series of others. So you read it as readers would have seen it.

It isn't like a joke. The first laugh at a joke means the punchline really did punch you. The next time you don't think the joke is complete garbage, you just aren't surprised a second time because you learned what is coming. With a joke we can still think it a clever twist, interpretation or reversal, there can even be another laugh in it, if it is good enough. But you laughed and that is all the evidence you need the joke delivered an unexpected but logical punchline.

A powerful phrase that no longer seems powerful, or seems trite, is different. Now what you thought was good seems bad, and the reason is the power was in the mental context of when you wrote it, and after a nights sleep that context is gone.

Truly powerful phrases grounded in the context provided by the writing leading up to them will still "read right" after a few days away from them, you will still be proud of them.

Be warned they can get stale if you read them again and again and again in a sitting. That is ALSO a mistake, you are memorizing the scene too much.

Write your scene. Go through it once, and fix any problems. Put it away until you have slept a night (work on something else) then read it and fix any problems. When you can read it through and like it all, consider it done (and do it all again in the future, of course, to make sure the whole story is properly connected).

And pay attention to your mind. Not everything in it is on the page, but everything in it can influence what you personally get out of the page. You have to take measures, through repeated "cold reads", that your mind is not helpfully filling in a bunch of gaps, and making poor writing feel good to you.

posted about 7 years ago

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Amadeus‭

3156 reputation 2 1399 613 37

Delete it ruthlessly. As writers, we are often addicted to the clever phrase (or the phrase that seems clever at the time). But we succeed or fail not as crafters of phrases but at tellers of stories. The storyteller in you has to keep the writer in you on a short leash or your story is going to get lost in clever phrases that are, in the cold light of story, "just flat, cringey, contrived, life-less."

Now, when you delete them is a separate question. The cult of the reckless first draft is strong in the writing community at the moment -- plow on at all costs without pausing to edit. That's fine if the result is a story that just needs the prose cleaned up. Some writers are perhaps fine intuitive storytellers who can get the story right the first time and just need additional drafts to clean up the prose.

But if the love of clever phrases is letting the writer in you rides roughshod over the storyteller in you (as it frequently seems to do in me) then the reckless first draft approach seems to produce only a tangled mess of clever phrases that don't add up to a story. In this case, I think you have to squash the clever phrases as soon as you detect them, go back and fix them before you move on because the chances are that they cover up a lack of proper storytelling that is going to come back to bite you later if you don't fix it.

posted about 7 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

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I'm going to echo the leave it for now finish your story crowd. It might actually work later if you can work it into some payoff in the future. I always like to point out things like "Hot Fuzz" which is a very boring opening with a lot of odd dialog... the payoff is in the second half where the dialog becomes funny because it provides a better joke... in some cases, the dialog is only funny on re-watch because you're aware of the way the movie is going to play out.

posted about 7 years ago

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hszmv‭

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