Literary Throat Clearing: How to Recognize & Make It Work For You

’Tis the season….the season for phlegm.

That is to say, it’s winter in the northern hemisphere, the time of year when traditionally, colds and runny noses circulate (of course this year, everything feels just a tad more…fraught…than usual).

And just like all of us would rather everyone keep their phlegm to themselves and ideally as far away from us as possible, your readers would also much appreciate you not clearing your literary throat all over them and the story they’re reading, either.

Am I talking about the dreaded ogre, the Prologue? Maybe. Sometimes. The Prologue gets a bad rap because of how often it has no other function than as literary throat clearing, and because beginnings are especially vulnerable to this malaise, but you don’t need a Prologue to be guilty of warming up your writing all over what should be the body of your book.

The Prologue gets a bad rap because of how often it has no other function than as literary throat clearing. But you don’t need a Prologue to be guilty. #writingtip #writerslife Share on XMost of us get caught with some literary phlegm now and then. How can you make that petri dish work for you?

Why do we do it?

With regards to writing, we say “throat clearing” when we mean the writer has left a whole bunch of text (usually at the beginning) that doesn’t ultimately contribute to a story.

Think about what you’re doing when you clear your throat—most of the time, you’re preparing to speak.

Why do writers do this? Peter Selgin aptly puts his finger on the issue: we start this way “to get the author’s pen rolling, to blow some warmth onto the icy blank page, to get the narrative blood flowing.”

Warmups are good for every practitioner. Every pro athlete or team has a warmup. Singers warm up before performances—so do actors. Surgeons prepare for surgery by going over the case and thinking about the procedure—sometimes by going through the hand motions. We preheat the oven before popping in the roast (or the pizza, or the cake).

Beyond getting you going, warmups give you information. As you free-write, you may discover important motivations for your characters, key connections between your arguments, and insights into why this memory has plagued your memoir for so long. The very freedom of doing practice is that you’re interested in getting the muscles moving rather than in perfection. This is information you may very well not get any other way.

So before you go nuclear on your throat-clearing habits, realize where they serve you.

A warmup is not the performance

That being said, while warmups have a time and a place and a value, by definition, they are not the final product or performance.

Your backstory exercises can help you write fully fleshed and realistically motivated characters, just as piano practice helps you to be ready for the recital. But practice and recital aren’t the same thing. When we go to hear a concert from world-renowned musicians, we aren’t expecting to hear them shaking out any stiffness on stage. We’re not expecting false notes. We are expecting a performance that moves and astonishes us both by the content and the delivery.

When you publish, your readers are expecting a performance from you.

Why include your warmups in what’s supposed to be your performance?

Literary throat clearing functions like a good first draft: it gets you going and gives you information. What your reader craves is the story you build out of that information. Unless you’re talking to a bunch of bricklayers, they’re not going to be all that interested in the bricks.

Recognize when your warmup has served its purpose

The trouble isn’t that we engage in literary throat clearing; the trouble is that we don’t take it out once we have the story in better shape.

Unlike singing, which is sound that fades over time, and running the fastest 100-meter race, which comes to an end, writing warmups tend to be tangible and preservable: you’ve written them down, so unless you delete them from the final draft, in the final draft they will stay.

But you can take them out.

The magic of revising your draft is that now that the hard work of generating words has been taken care of, you can take a close look at those words and make sure they’re exactly the ones you need.

To continue with our brick-laying analogy, you can check whether any of the bricks have cracks, an unfortunate color, or are the appropriate shape and size for where they are in the building. Just like builders start with a scaffolding that they remove once the house is complete, you can now take out the pieces that don’t serve a purpose. If you come across a passage where you’re telling the story to yourself, you can (and should) remove it.

Bottom Line

When are your readers going to be fanatically interested in the story notes you scribbled while writing your book?

That’s right: after you’ve become a best-selling author and household name. If you’re lucky.

Until then (and probably even afterwards!), please, please, please warm up as you need…

…and then let the warmup go, and deliver the performance of your life.

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Need help figuring out where your warmup ends? A chapter one critique or book structure intensive can get your book ready for story-telling wow.

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Be careful that your warmup doesn’t put your readers to sleep. CC image “Stretch” courtesy of Paul Hayday on Flickr. Some rights reserved.