here’s a quick list of my writing sins (likely incomplete):
- I say all cool things I think of twice, or more.
- My narrative pacing requires tuning–I either rush or linger too long
- My plots (do they exist?)
- I underwrite certain key points, or bury them
- I leave awkward phrasing lying around
- I like ideas and have too many extraneous bits
and here’s a quick list of my fixes (still under development):
- I have to pick my favorite image (sometimes, I just toss a coin)
- I’m cutting down that which does not move the story forward
- I focus on introducing conflict, or at least suspense, and unforeseen developments into the story
- I try to make evident the central point(s) of the story
- I read and reread and make others read out loud, each iteration, so I can figure out what language is confusing or awkward
- By having a storyline, and focusing on momentum in the beginning and end, I can kill the extras
I’ve massively revised three stories in ten days. It’s been a luxurious stretch — I’ve been indulging in a slight, but growing feeling of mastery over my words and storytelling. Ladies and gentlemen, this is as exciting as writing gets.
Here’s a bonsai metaphor–as a writer, you keep trimming and guiding the growing thing and you hope you don’t end up with a horrifying shapeless garbled web of a bush, and you try not to trim down until you have a stick, but both are tempting avenues. The big trick is to somehow visualize the emerging shape before it’s actually there and then encourage its emergence — on paper. [You have to imagine a ghost of a story into being.] (You have to terrify the page into surrender.) I’ll stop my metaphors here, but you get the picture: Gardener, warrior, Voodoo priest, these are the components of authorship. Let’s throw in monastic novice as well, because although this post is lofty, my writing experience is one of extreme humility and short lived aha moments.
The turning point was watching a brilliant editor, in my case Ellen Parker of FRiGG Magazine, edit down my sleeping beauty story–she helped me increase the narrative speed, cleared the brush of unnecessary ideas, and unburied the ending. It was great observing someone else at work on my text. It liberated me to rework my other texts. Her approach to polishing my story gave me insight into my writing sins and how to move beyond them. I’ve been frantically practicing these skills, and now school starts again.