Blogger: Rachel Kent
Peanuts has been all over my social media feeds for the last week or so. Everyone is getting excited about The Snoopy Movie releasing on November 6 and there’s a new book releasing, Only What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts. I live in Santa Rosa, which is where Charles Schultz also lived and worked, and just this week it was announced that there is a limited edition Peanuts library card for locals to help promote literacy. I want to take my daughter to get one. And, on Thursday, the post office unveiled special Christmas stamps at the Charles M. Schultz museum in honor of the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
If you haven’t Peanutized yourself yet, you should! 🙂
In this USA Today article about Only What’s Necessary, you can see that the book is focused on how the simplicity of Charles Schultz’s comics were key to making them so successful. The last line of the article (which is part of the book’s foreword) is this:
“Schulz understood how to make every line count. Nothing extraneous, no waste. Only what’s necessary.”
This is great advice for all writers. If you are writing something more than comics you will need more words, but every line and every word should count as your write your manuscript. It is always a good idea to read your project out loud to yourself (or to others) to make sure your story or nonfiction project is packing the punch it needs to have. You will want to pay special attention to repetition of words and ideas. Be sure that your manuscript is building up to the conclusion without wasting word count on fluff. Sometimes this will mean deleting entire sections of your manuscript, but deleting those sections of fluff will give you more word count to work with to build your masterpiece.
And words are especially precious when you have a limited word count of 100 words like you do for the flash fiction contest! Every word should count!
What editing tricks do you use to make your book as strong as it can be?
Was Peanuts influential in your life? How so?
Don’t forget!
Our agency is teaming up with Splickety Prime Magazine for a flash fiction contest that you all get to enter along with other flash fiction fans. Cool prizes will be handed out. See this blog for details: https://booksandsuch.com/blog/flash-fiction-contest/
And this blog for hints on how to write great flash fiction: https://booksandsuch.com/blog/flash-fiction-challenge/
*It was the Charles Schultz blog: daily wisdom and humor in four line drawings and 50+/- words.
*It’s interesting, Rachel, that your community is using Peanuts to promote literacy. My boys often selected books of their favorite comic strips from the library. They wore out a Bible written in comic book format. Peanuts could be the textbook for adult literacy programs.
Isn’t it cool?! I need to get down there before I miss the opportunity for my daughter to have a Peanuts library card.
I hadn’t heard of “The Snoopy Movie”. If that’s an image from it, I think I’ll pass. Charles Schultz never used chiaroscuro; and I’d rather not see his characters moving in a world of light and shade. Their two-dimensional world was one of the things that gave the characters such depth, because Schultz drew only that which was necessary.
* My writing has been and is hugely influenced by Charles Schultz; I’m very heavy on dialogue, with the shortest declamations possible. In my mind’s eye, each character has a limited ‘word balloon’ per frame.
* My character names are simple, and never descriptive. I trip over exotic names. The most exotic name Schultz used was ‘Schroeder’, and I assume it was a surname; calling one another by a surname was not uncommon when I grew up.
* There’s very little description in what I do; I try to leave as much to the readers’ imaginations as possible. That includes what the characters look like…perhaps that’s the most important bit. We love most the characters that we, as readers, help shape.
That’s supposed to be me, Andrew. 🙂 I Peanutized myself.
The movie is done with computer animation though, so no hand drawing in this movie. 🙁 It won’t have the same charm as the old ones, for sure.
I love that Schultz has been influential in your writing!
My brother and I loved the Peanuts specials, and we always read Peanuts in the comics. I agonized every time Lucy held the football for Charlie Brown. I never trusted her to let him kick the ball.
My brother and I used to spend time drawing the characters and making up comic strips. In answer to your question, yes Peanuts had an influence on my childhood. I think the two main things that have stuck with me are to never give up hoping and be nice to others. That will preach any day of the week.
Thanks for sharing, Rachel.
The Thanksgiving Day Special scared me! I hated the lawn chair that tries to eat Snoopy. 🙂
Does anyone remember “The Gospel According to Peanuts” by Robert Short? It was a great, warm and wonderful book, and you can still get it for a penny on Amazon. Here’s the link –
http://www.amazon.com/Gospel-According-Peanuts-Robert-Short/dp/0664222226
Hi, Andrew. We’ve got that book around here somewhere. First time I saw it was at my grandmother’s house.
“Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go….”
* Isn’t this fun, Jackie, with all the Peanuts-themed memories that come back? A huge Thank You to Rachel for this day!
Pretty sure it is still on my bookshelf, although I haven’t read it anytime lately.
I love your Peanut character! Aww!
Editing secrets? I print my book out single-spaced in a different font and red-line it. I also read it out loud. Works for me!
Thank you! My character matches my day-to-day style pretty well, I think.
Reading out loud takes time, but I think it is so worth it!
I let myself write extraneous words in first drafts–sometimes lots of them. This is so that I can end up saying what I really wanted to say in the end. But I’m ruthless during the editing phase, hacking entire sections of my manuscript at a time. P.S. I love the Peanuts. My middle son looks and behaves just like Charlie Brown and we own a young, naughty Beagle. 🙂
Awww, you have your very own Charlie Brown and Snoopy! 🙂 Fun.
When I complete the first draft of a novel, I carefully read the electronic version, looking for redundancy in word usage, extraneous words and phrases, and an organic balance between proper names and pronouns. Then I read the electronic version a second time, again looking to tighten the manuscript so it has nothing that doesn’t add to the forward momentum of the plot. After the second electronic reading, I print out hard copy and read again. I chunk when I read, so proof-reading is difficult for me to do on the electronic version. For me, hard copy also makes it easier to see where something needs to be added to fill a gap or strengthen a weak dialogue or description. I can follow along with the tip of a pencil to catch what my eyes alone skipped over. Since I’m writing a series of novels (three complete, two in process, one more percolating in my mind) that share some characters, I also watch for inconsistencies in the characters, settings, and events between the different novels. I use the “find” function a lot to do this.
A friend in college gave me a plaque featuring Linus, holding his blanket and pointing skyward with his finger, that is the opposite of a good life philosophy. “No problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from.” I’ve always told my kids that a problem is so much easier to solve if you tackle it as soon as you find it instead of waiting for it to grow so big it overwhelms you. There’s a spiritual parallel. It’s so much easier to resist the first temptation than to turn back when you’ve already yielded.
That sounds like a great system! Having the same characters in multiple books adds another layer to the editing, for sure.
Happy Peanuts memories! My mom had the Peanuts comics books from the 1950s & 1960s, and my sister and I would binge-read all 20-odd of them. We could quote many of our favorite strips. I can’t believe those books are still in one piece!
We had a bunch, too! My brothers really liked them.
My writer’s critique group has helped me see particular words that I overuse. Now if I use them, it catches my attention every time. The end result is always better when other experienced writers read my manuscripts and critique them, and I learn from the editing process. We’re often too immersed in our writing to recognize what we need to change.
I agree! Sometimes the outside perspective is the best one for editing!
I use text-to-speech software to have my computer read my work to me. It helps me catch minor errors that I’d have missed by just reading it. Plus hearing my words clues me into sentences that don’t flow well. Now I never submit or post anything on my blog without taking this step.
You’ve inspired me to Peanutize myself! So cute. I still have a little stuffed Snoopy. (Should I admit that? haha) I will definitely see the movie. Yes, get a Peanuts library card! How fun is that?
I just hope they don’t take away the old Peanuts where Linus tells the Christmas Story but with this coming out so close to Christmas, they just might.
I love Peanuts…and I did take the time to Peanutize myself recently.
The way I best edit is by just getting it all down on paper and then going back to read the manuscript three times. After that is done, I search for often used words to see how many appear in my manuscript and begin replacing some of them.