Friday Focus: Writing a book is a struggle

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one was not driven on by some demon who one can neither resist nor understand.” ~George Orwell

Yep. I am totally loving this quote. Loving it.

Happy Friday!

The Words We Choose

According to George Orwell in Politics of the English Language, a writer should ask him/herself a few questions with every sentence that is written.  (I haven't been able to put questions one through four into action yet, as I would rather finish my latest editing and then go back over it with a fine-toothed comb to ask questions such as these, but I thought I would share his advice now anyway.)

George Orwell says,

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 

1. What am I trying to say? 

2. What words will express it? 

3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 

4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? 

And he will probably ask himself two more: 

1. Could I put it more shortly? 

2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?"

As I re-read these questions today I realized I've already been working on the last two - especially the "could I put it more shortly" one.  I've read over my WiP billions of times (well it feels like billions) and I'm just beginning to see sentence after sentence (after sentence!) with *completely* unnecessary words.  It's as though I had blinders on, and someone took them off a few days ago, enabling me to finally see the whole picture.  

Deleting those unnecessary words is a relief for the most part, but now I have yet another problem.  Yep.  Word count.  I'm starting to panic about my word count again.  (Luckily I'm copying the latest draft over into my "current" draft one chapter at a time, so I have no clue what my true word count will be when I finish.  I can't imagine how much I'd freak out if I saw words dropping from my final word count right now. Gasp!)

So do any of those six questions affect you at all, my writerly readers?  If so, what have you done to resolve those issues?