I t’s not only our houses that could usually do with a good clean and polish in spring. As the days are getting longer, and as we’re all doing our best to shake off our winter lethargy - okay, as I personally am doing my best to shake off my own winter lethargy - I find it’s a good time to think about spring cleaning my writing, too.
All those cobwebs of redundant adjectives and adverbs, all that dust of repetition, all those carefullycrafted episodes that don’t actually advance my story line - at some point in the process I know I shall need to be ruthless and to sweep them out of my literary house. It can be somewhat depressing to realise I’ve written a first draft that I’ve checked for redundant adjectives and so on, but which still doesn’t feel quite right, although it’s not obvious why. So, when I’m trying to identify what doesn’t seem to work in a piece of writing, I refer to my list of points to check.