Truly an amazing book! Everyone talks about needing to "show" rather than "tell" in your writing but then they tell instead of showing you how to do it. Chapter 1 is all about "Show and Tell". They take a scene from The Great Gatsby and show you how most writers would write it - as a narrative summary. That's how I was trained to write as a journalist. I can write like that, blindfolded and spun around, until the cows come home. Writing the "show" is completely different.
Reading through that chapter reminded me of the trouble I had when I first started shooting stories with the video camera at j-school. I took great still photos. But when I got the film back to the station, what I THOUGHT I'd captured didn't show up on film. I had to retrain my eye to see as the video camera sees. I know how to write great narrative summary but now I need to truly make my scenes SCENES - show events as they unfold, SHOW why they feel things, resist the urge to explain to the reader what a character is feeling, what is going on that would cause the characters to have those emotions. Tells can heighten engagement but make sure the scene is taking them on an emotional journey. Readers remember more how you made them feel than what you said. I've heard said of a couple of multi-million in print authors that their writing wasn't very good. That is entirely possible. But why then did I hear from readers that "the books were like crack", they couldn't put them down, they could hardly wait to read some more and get another fix. They were written so that you FELT what was going on and you desperately wanted to hang onto that FEELING. Make the reader feel, not think.
How do you do that? Ever writer, including #1 NYT best selling authors have said, they don't really know. It's kind of a mystery that happens with any of the arts. What you can learn are elements that show up in the things that work and practice it so it becomes easier.
As for me, I'm on page 254 of my 30th or so edit of Collected. There's so much still there for me to take a second look at, especially the stuff I did on the previous pages. I've 9 chapters still to read in Self-Editing and my critique partner has not yet returned his edit of my March edition. What it is today is so much better than what I gave him 5 months ago but I still want his input. I remember thinking that reading through all 350 pages was an enormous task. And it is. But if two hugely successful writers I respect edit their work 35-40 times and they know more about this stuff I'm just learning, then the number of edits I will need to go through before my work truly shines should be even greater. Janet Wong told us at the Bond Children's Literature Conference a few years ago that she tweaked the 29 WORDS in her poem Noodles around 100 times.
I remember sitting there thinking, "Oh, my God! That's nuts! Shouldn't it have been just fine after 20 or so edits. It's only 29 words." Today, I don't think she's so crazy. What would be crazy would be to edit my work without a specific goal in mind. Even though I've got real tools in my hands now, tools that SHOW me how something can be improved, I can't catch it all at once and my skills are not yet what they could be. Good writers are good readers, too. I need to pull down some of the books I love and find some of the books fellow writers rave about as being a good read so that I can look at how those writers made it work. I want to be able to hum the song without even thinking about it for I've picked up the patterns from repeated exposure.
So enough for today. I need to squeeze in some editing. I've got some errands to run. And then I need to work on making my house presentable for company - a huge project as we haven't had guests over in over a year and you know how things slide when you don't need to try.
Until next time.
