Clearing the Clutter

My latest writing book.

Clearing the clutter from your manuscript is literary self-defense.

A great writer knows the real story is hidden in the first draft. The challenge isn’t adding more words—it’s skillfully taking away the ones that don’t belong.

But how do you know what to cut?

"Clearing the Clutter" is the tool you’ve been looking for. Author/editor Alton Gansky guides you through the art of self-editing for clarity and impact. This is a practical guide for transforming cluttered drafts into clean, confident prose.

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Book Contents

1.The Secret to Professional, Powerful Prose

2. Hidden Reef: Clutter Is Sinking Your Writing

3. Hunting the Giant Behemoth: Eliminating Redundancy

4. More Isn't More: Defeating Bloat (Pleonasm)

5. Over-writers Anonymous—How to Cure Prolixity

6. Is Your Prose Swollen? Curing Turgid Writing

7. A Guide to Defeating Purple Prose

8. Avoid the Attribution Apocalypse: Clean, Powerful Dialogue

9. Don't Pardon the Intrusion—Keeping Your Voice Out of the Story

10. The Butler Did It—Avoiding Narrator Intrusion

11. The Modifier Menace—Taming Adverbs, Adjectives, and Qualifiers

12. The Prepositional Pile-up—Unclogging Your Sentences

13. The Ultimate Goal: Guide to Crystal Clarity

14. The Best Writing is Rewriting—A Final Encouragement