Strunk and White

My writing process is messy. In every other aspect of my life, I am almost maniacally organized. I formulate plans and I adhere rigidly to those plans. I'm really out of control when it comes to planning. for example, if I have three tasks: fold and put away laundry, make a phone call and pee, I will determine the most efficient, time-saving way to accomplish all these tasks before I even get up from the couch. Most times, I end up talking on the phone while folding laundry and jumping up and down with my legs crossed, but damn it-- it's efficient. If you know me, then you know the sad truth is that I am not exaggerating in the slightest. so you'd naturally assume that when I write, I write out character sketches and detailed plot outlines. Oh, if only. My creative writing process seems inexplicably to require chaos. Set me down with a laptop and an idea for a story, and I'm like a Boston terrier on crack. The process is anything but efficient. I have accepted this. Admitted defeat is probably more accurate, because I have tried and tried to change the way I write, but I end up with flat characters who go through contrived motions. Granted, they do so in a very streamlined manner, but the writing isn't fun, and if I wanted to sit at a computer and do stuff that wasn't fun... well, I have a day job for that.
So I'm in the very last stage of editing my manuscript, the polish it up all nice and perfect stage, and it's a little like wrestling an octopus. Well, I've got it mostly subdued, with only the occasional stray fly-out tentacle, but it occurred to me that after all the cutting and rewriting and moving and shuffling and point of view shifting, that I might have lost sight of the basics a ways back. You guessed it, I need to "Omit unnecessary words!"
I was trained as a journalist, so there were two books that I was taught to revere as though they were holy scripture. The first was the Associated Press Style Book, which changes with each new edition for reasons that I can only determine are monetary, because the last really substantive changes came as a result of the fall of Communism, yet they keep cranking out new editions year after year. Still, the A.P. Style guide is the journalist's definitive handbook, even if it seems to be definitive only on ambiguity. Word usage that would have instantly revealed you to be an amateur to the upper classmen when I was in college is now somehow the divinely decreed "right way." We have one handy office copy of it here. We use it to swat flies. The other book, which isn't big enough to give a fly so much as a mild concussion, is "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. Reading it is like a no-nonsense boot camp on grammar. It is perhaps a bit rigid and can be heavy handed, but there's a reason it has withstood the test of time with hardly a change and it is just what I need as I embark on my final manuscript polish. Saint Strunk? Maybe.