Back to the ‘Write Cut Rewrite’ exhibition at Oxford’s Weston Library, which includes pages from detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler’s notebooks. Chandler worked hard on the seemingly throwaway remarks which appear throughout his works, recording his ideas and marking them as used when he’d included them in a novel.
Who, I wonder, was as “slippery as a watermelon seed”?
And whose face “was long enough to wrap twice round his neck”?
A page titled ‘Similes and gags’ features this corker: “She threw her arms around my neck and nicked my ear with the gunsight”.
As George Orwell observed in his 1948 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, which offered tips for good writing: 'Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print'.
‘Write Cut Rewrite’ is on at the Weston Library, Oxford, until January 5, 2025.
Admission is free, there’s an excellent café on site adjacent to the well-stocked Bodleian Shop.
More from ‘Write Cut Rewrite’ on these pages soon.
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