Originally Posted by: earthman buckJolly, I have to ask: how do you decide what to put in and what to keep out? Surely a guy who can write as well as you comes up with a lot of different endings, adjectives, meanings, etc. How do you decide whether something is worthy enough to put in your stories?

I only ask because when I try to write songs (or on rarer occasions, stories), I make them up as I go and come up with about 30,000 different ideas, all of which I like, but obviously I can't put them all in.

So....do you have some sort of test your ideas must pass before you put pen to paper?

Technically I free-wrote the basics of this story in the literal pen on paper as soon as I got back to my dorm room one day. Much of the content hasn't changed, and the themes are all still the same. How do I decide what phrases to change and what to use etc? Well, I guess it depends on several factors. One, the cadence of the piece, if a word doesn't roll off the last word I hate to use it unless it's specifically designed to halt the reader. Typically I want each word to seem as though it naturally succeeds the last and naturally leads into the next.

Ultimately what I decide to leave in or take out depends on stylistic taste, though. I mean, take "Vanessa de Mille," for example. Her name seemed just too obvious a play on the Venus de Milo, it made the whole passage seem cheesy or campy, so I shortened it to simply "Vanessa." The Venessa/Venus parallel is still there, but without the redundant "de Mille." Some things I don't put in because they detract from the point or are completely tangential. For instance, I'd written up a passage explaining exactly how (the mechanics of the situation) Thomas had come upon Vanessa and the curator together, but really it wasn't necessary. The story simply didn't need to say HOW he'd found them out, just that he had. I try to use the sufficient adjectives as well, since you asked. At first the curator was "filth-ridden anti-ascetic. Reaper of those foolish enough to trust him. Usurping lecher." Really, the first two were unnecessary and impeded the progress of the piece itself. Or, another example, armless, assless Venus de Milo used to make Thomas think "can't ****, can't wipe." The phrasing was simply too direct, especially since "shat" was in the sentence just before it, so I changed it to "fertilizer of fallow fields." I needed my words and adjectives also to fit the themes. Stillwatching, for instance, reminding the reader of stasis. In that vein, words like marblelimestonefloorsurface slowly breakdown the illusion of superiority, the thought slowly morphs into something more and more basic. Marblelimestonefloorbreaking, however, is slightly different, because instead of simplifying, it simply gives off the combined feeling of two objects running together at the moment of impact.

As far as some kind of test goes, I usually just write within the themes and story that I had in my head. Later on I go back and tweak the language.