Getting away with it . . . NOT!

Hi, I’m Alex and I’m a lazy writer. There, the first step in my rehabilitation, or just plain ‘habilitation’ as I’m not yet completely housebroken. Oh, I’m okay with plot creation, characters, dialog and action. What I’m not so good at is editing. Real, no-mistakes editing. When I’m ‘through’ with my latest creation, I want to post it to Smashwords and Amazon and move on to the next intriguing conceit. But, I have this editor, thank God.

My wife/muse, Barbara, is an eagle-eyed reviewer and corrector. She learned it the hard way by editing grant proposals for a company whose life blood was government contracts. It was do-or-die in that game. No other government was available for simultaneously submission.

Barbara lets me slide on innumerable domestic lapses; the toothpaste cap, darks mixed with whites, past-expiration snacks, impulsive Amazon purchases, etc. But, when it comes to tense, punctuation, spelling and syntax, there is no hiding from her laser. Oh, sure, I grumble and sometimes whine about her exactitude, but late at night when I detect her lady snores, I get on my unworthy knees and thank the Great Publisher in the Sky for her willingness to save an unworthy knave from the opprobrium I would surely (deservedly) suffer.

Great Riff on Writing:

Writing about writers is tempting but can be tricky and elusive. Last night, I re-watched ‘Adaptation’ by the Kaufman ‘twins’ (actually Charlie Kaufman and his fictitious brother) and laughed and clucked and shook my head in wonderment as to how well they captured the travails of being an author. His voice over angst of writer’s block and other neuroses are classic. Watch it, writer pals, and tell me honestly if you haven’t known some of those black dog thoughts.

Coloring:

After my ‘scene list’ — a poor man’s outline (discussed previously) — I tend to bull through the writing with situations and dialog predominant. Early on, my editor and some readers commented on my relative paucity of ‘color’; descriptions of people and places. I have had to work on developing that aspect of my writing and am making progress, I hope. I still do the blast-through-it first draft and come back to enhance the color on the second or third review. In the course of my struggles, I have developed some observations about ‘coloring’:

* Weave in people descriptions, don’t just plop them down. A description should be revealed in the course of getting to know a character. Instead of leading with ‘he was six foot three inches tall, weighed 207 pounds and had size 10 shoes’, there might be an initial impression like ‘he loomed in the doorway menacingly’ to be followed by his redolence of bat guano and his high water overalls as the scene unfolds. (In script form, however, there is format requirement for a curt description when a character is first introduced).

* Place color has to be more frontloaded to give necessary orientation. ‘Light only penetrated the cavern the length of a dog’s leash’ should help the reader ‘see’ the situation the protagonist sees. Otherwise, it leaves the reader unsure whether this scene is taking place in the woods or in an alley and, if too subtle, can require the reader to do annoying backtracking.

A writer naturally has a mental images of his/her characters and settings. It is the writers’ duty to allow the reader to not only see what the writer sees but to smell, taste, hear and sense the temperature. Summary: put the reader IN the scene.