June 27, 2007
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Wake of the Raven: a paragraph that I cut out
Someone quoted the British writer E.M. Forster on the subject of love, and that reminded me of the one time that I actually took advice on a major point from a writer’s group.
It was in Manchester, England, and usually I’d found that advice on minor points was useful, because it’s easy to make mistakes on minor points, but on major ones I usually stuck fast to my opinions or methods, as I’d thought them out well before.
But I’d definitely made a mistake in the offending chapter – chapter three – by entering into a wordy tangle as I tried to explain the hero’s feelings on love. The consequence was that the whole chapter was too heavy-handed and “purple.”
With much whining and moaning I cured it by cutting about a quarter out. I’ll paste just one paragraph of the offending text below, a paragraph that does not appear in the finished novel.
What’s your opinion? Is it too “gushy”?
But why had he not seen this essential difference in her, a difference that could not be ignored or bridged? That was beyond Stuart’s power to determine, but the truth was that he saw the love, and not the thing that he loved. He loved but he did not understand: he did not understand Jennifer because he did not understand himself. He loved but he did not understand that her love was not as his, even as she was not as him. Nor did he understand that love could be other than as he felt it to be; that like all these great emotions that mankind names so glibly it covered a range as wide as that which separates the burning desert from the snow bound Himalayan peaks.
Comments (2)
I don’t know about gushy. It could be read as tangential, but I haven’t read what was around it either. I suppose the question is, do you like the novel better without this text in it?
I don’t know, I just got lost at the part with the Himalayas.
Fuck. I wish I were from England.