Everything That Doesn't Look Like an Elephant

Editing my flash fiction, stories under 500 words, reminds me of the old joke: How do you carve a statue of an elephant? Start with a block of marble, and remove everything that doesn't look like an elephant.

Except that you don't only carve away -- with words, unlike marble, you can also choose to replace the offending piece. This makes the writer's job easier than the sculptor's in some way (infinite supply of material), and worse in others (infinite supply of material). After chipping off a misshapen 'trunk', for example, you'll typically want to find a new word to take its place. (portmanteau, suitcase, or coffer might do).

I wrote the first draft of a new flash yesterday, revised it then and there for overall shape (yep, sorta looks like an elephant), and today I've been doing serial, iterative, revisions, first sentence by sentence and now word by word. Lots of them. Halfway through the day, I wondered what the piece would look like if I'd turned on "Track Changes" in Word, but I'm probably better off not knowing.

End of the day, it definitely looks like an elephant to me. Tomorrow I'll be reading it out loud, to see if it sounds like one.