Fellow writer and blogger Claudia Del Balso brought this interesting topic to my attention last week. The Carver-ification of one's writing. As I'm slowly crawling into editing mode, Raymond Carver is somebody I should read and look up to. For those who don't know the guy, he's a powerhouse short story writer that inspired the likes of Haruki Murakami. He mastered a style later referred to as "minimalism", which lived off a very important quality: accuracy.
The work of Carver made a statement of being insanely accurate. No need for adverbs, adjectives and other uselessness when the combination of words you selected evokes a strong image. The more the words are small, simple and lonely, the more the thing it represent is pure of all writer guidelines. When you do your job with the attention to detail Carver does, you can afford to leave yourself out of the story. I can see only one way of doing this and it's through intense sessions of line-editing. Taking every sentence on its own and pondering about its efficiency. Maybe that's why he did nothing but short stories through his lifetime. Making stories pure means to cut out the fat and leave it out.
I'm evaluating my first draft is going to have 290 to 295 pages. I am scared I won't have the patience and the dedication to line-edit and re-write the way I want. The story is getting clearer and clearer. Before, only the ending was really clear (and now hard to write?), now I have a good (and interesting) course of action. That will still put Solace on the border of the literary and noir style but whatever, I know it's what I want deep down inside, whether my conscious self knows or not. Now I need to finish that last chapter, read Carver again and go on with line-editing.
