A sore thumb

It’s the first day of my juice diet: and I’m not talking fruit juice. This is hard core vegetable juice. Raw, natural, and tastes as bad as it looks. I’m getting used to it, though, and if I stick at it for long enough the local pie and cake shops are going to feel the pinch. And I hope I do stick at it because the detoxification process helps me sleep better and dream better, and that increases my creativity and my ability to feel inspired.

There’s no point in being inspired, however, if you haven’t enough time to use it. Today has been overloaded with those annoying tasks that get in the way of writing, and I only managed to dedicate about an hour to the novel. During that hour I cut a paragraph that I realised stood out like a sore cliché. It’s a relic of the early days of my work on this book, probably penned in 1997, back when I used to write with a pen and a notebook before typing it into my lovely DOS word processor.

This was the original passage from my early draft:

“The row intensified. One of the men shoved the other as emphasis for his point of view, and promptly received a punch in the face as a logical progression of the argument. The first guard summarised the finer points of his opinions with a high kick that met his colleague in the stomach. Having recovered from being winded, this man reminded the other that his philosophy was backed up by learned opinion by spitting in his face and drawing a knife from his belt.”

It has a silly, tongue-in-cheek tone which is incongruous to the rest of the chapter. Much as I enjoyed these Moliere-inspired lines, I had to accept that they had no place in this novel. After 13 or 14 years sitting safely in the manuscript these words were today cut back to:

“The row intensified. One of the men shoved the other and promptly received a punch in the face."

Harsh, but necessary. The book cannot be a harbour for little snippets of irrelevant literary humour, and the passage had to be cut in the greater interest of creating a coherent tone for the novel. So the book shrunk a little today to just over 168,000 words. And I think after one day on the juice diet I’ve probably shrunk by about the same amount.