This is one of those baffling questions my youngest daughter asked me the other day on the way home from school. As a parent you get used to a bombardment of seemingly random questions, like ‘What’s the opposite of sky?’ or ‘Why does the alphabet always have to be in alphabetical order?’
Anyway it turned out she was talking about the way maths groups are organised at school. For literacy it’s colour groups (blue, green, white, etc) but for maths they’re either in the Adds or the Takeaways.
Do the Takeaways rule?
But the question got me thinking about an aspect of the writing process that has been on my mind recently. So many writers around me seem to be in the Takeaways when it comes to revising their drafts. You might hear, Oh I had 200,000 words to start with and had to lose half of them. And y’know what? Secretly I’m thinking, blimey, if I cut 50% of my drafts I’d be left with hardly anything at all to work with! It’s funny how most writerly advice is based on the assumption we have an excess of material, an extra layer of fat that needs trimming, as we work towards that final draft. Cut back 10%. Cut the first three chapters. Cut, cut, cut!
But what about if you have the problem not of too many words but too few? In that case please come and join my gang, the Adds. My early drafts never reach the target word length – I’m always adding, adding, adding until I get there. I’m cool with this M.O. most of the time but you know how the occasional doubt creeps in – that little voice that says perhaps you’re not doing it right?
So you can imagine how thankful I was to read a blog post recently by the lovely Erika Robuck, who’s a writer of historical fiction I ‘met’ through Twitter. Here she writes about using the analogy of the body when she’s writing and revising. I found these words in particular very reassuring:
With this draft I have a skeleton with some tendons. Maybe I have an eyeball or thin layer of muscle at various places, but no more. With each revision or critique another layer gets added until finally, there’s a whole body.
Yes, I thought. This is exactly how it works for me too, Erika. Perhaps there are more of us in the Adds after all.
So, in a quick and very unscientific attempt to test my theory that the Takeaways are in the majority, here’s my question. Do you belong to the Adds or the Takeaways?
Fiona Joseph
12 Comments
I’m so glad to hear there’s another adder out there. I was a little worried I was doing something wrong. I suppose our writing personalities are as varied as our personalities in general.
Thanks for the mention!
I’m in the Adds group. In some ways I quite envy the Takeaways. My early drafts are just not that fully imagined and tend to roughly double in length before I complete the final version.
I honestly don’t know which I am! I tend to start with not enough words, but usually take away some before I add any more, then take more away again, proceeding in small increments… Probably makes me an adder. Perhaps I’m more of a multiplier, though. Or a fractal. My stories tend to start from one tiny image that repeats itself through various permutations, until I put a stop to it by typing ‘The End’.
I’m totally a Takeaway! Except when I get to the last edit I turn into an Add so that I can pick up on extra themes I’ve noticed and thread them through the rest of the story. Then I usually have to do more Taking Away…
I’m going to stretch Erika Robuck’s body analogy to breaking point. My first draft is more likely to be a skeleton and, yes, I add layers to make the body complete. But, working on the first draft, I often find that I had too many bones to start with (the initial scope was too ambitious) and these have to be discarded. Then after adding and adding I find that there are too many layers and the body is ‘flabby’, or there is too much adipose tissue obscuring the muscle. That’s when, in those final two or three drafts, my scalpel becomes a more useful tool than my pen. So, on balance, Fiona, put me in the take-away camp.
This is really interesting folks.
Thank you Erika for the loan of the body metaphor. As soon as I read your post I was relieved that someone else was in the Adds.
I know what you mean Kate about envying the Takeaways and their word counts. Next time someone asks me how far I’ve got with a story I might just lie.
Georgina, I think I need to refine my categories a little further. A fractal is a beautiful and very elegant image!
Alex, thanks for stopping by. It’s interesting what you said about final edits and working on those themes that emerge. I’m like this with imagery, thinking about what I can add to really make those images resonate and connect with each other. This is one of the more fun parts of the writing process.
Rob, I agree that having too many bones to begin with can be a killer. (As an Add I’m pretty much obsessed with making sure the story structure is in place first – I don’t seem able to write otherwise.) It sounds like you have a good balance in your approach.
Fiona x
Add, take…add a bit more, take a bit more. I’ve never been good at making that rapid first run, just getting it down in some kind of mad splurge. As I go on I find the ‘it’ emerging between the lines and I want to go back and make ‘it’ clearer before moving on. But in the end, I end up taking out great chunks of what I’ve built up oh so slowly and painstakingly, usually to good advantage.
That said, I think my method has something to do with not having more than an hour or so at a time to work on something – and that only if I’m lucky and am not too tired. Its different when I’m on holiday, say, and have a whole day or even half a day to work on one thing.
Sorry–firmly on the side of the Takeaways. Write long and cut. Dump it all down on paper, then go back and edit, edit, edit. It’s not the writing, it’s the re-writing.
As a class assignment I tell my students to write a 60-second spot, cut to a :30, then a :10. I can instantly spot those who wrote a :10, added some rubbish to make it a :30, then more rubbish to make it a :60.
So add if you will, but don’t add rubbish!
Hah! Great post. I’m a takeaway too, but a very very reluctant one. Hate losing a word until it’s gone and then I nearly ALWAYS think, ah, so much better! But where I do add is normally details of place. First time round I seem to concentrate on characters and action, and so it’s good to work on rooting most fiction pieces.
Tend to go in with the full intention of taking away, but somehow ending up with more than I started!
Thought provoking post. I would say that most of the time I fall into the Takeaway group, but a few piece I have written lately and one flash fiction I am working on right now have me working in the Add party. I prefer taking away though. Pruning the unnecessary stuff is easier than filling in the gaps.