A good writer edits drafts of his story, speech, or song

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A writer needs to edit his drafts both for grammar and spelling. The April 27, 2021 Pearls Before Swine cartoon has dialogue where Rat tells us what NOT to do:

 

Goat: Hey, Rat. What are you doing?

Rat: Just got to the end of a story I’m writing. I’m hoping to get it published.

Goat: That’s great. How much time will you need for the re-writing?

Rat: My writing’s perfect the first time.

Goat: I see.

Rat: Revisions are only for sad little losers.

 

Recently I was listening to the radio and heard a 2008 song Human by The Killers. Its chorus is shown above. Use of dancer rather than dancers makes me cringe, and my suggestions for five changes (adding s) are shown in red. Some who couldn’t understand the lyric had transcribed it as saying denser. Brandon Flowers refused to change it, but he claimed to have gotten the idea to use dancer from this quote from Hunter S. Thompson:

"We’re raising a generation of dancers, afraid to take one step out of line"

 

Other songwriters are not afraid to edit their lyrics. Josh Ritter has a song titled Harrisburg on his album The Golden Age of Radio. One version of its second verse says:

 

“Could have stayed somewhere, but train tracks kept going

It seems like they always left soon

And the people he ran with, they moaned low and painful

Sang sad misereres to the moon”

 

I had to look in the Merriam-Webster dictionary to find out the obscure word miserere means a vocal complaint or lament. The acoustic version on the Deluxe Edition and a live version have that verse changed to instead read:

 

“They could have stayed somewhere, train tracks kept going

It seems like they always left soon

And the wolves that he ran with, moaned low and painful

Sang their sad lullabys at the moon, at the moon”

 

Some lyrics are memorable because they contain an unusual phrase, like the title for the popular song Seven Nation Army by the duo The White Stripes. You can watch and listen to it in this YouTube video. I imagine a Seven-Nation-Army might have appeared somewhere in the J. R. R. Tolkien novel The Return of the King. But actually as a child Jack White misheard it as being what is the Salvation Army. There also is a YouTube video with Homer and Bart Simpson starting to play the song. But the murderous opening riff really isn’t played on a bass – it’s on a guitar lowered an octave.