16 April 2013

Did I tell you...

... that I contracted with an editor? Just last week. While I'm excited to be working with one of my favorite authors, her first exercise for me is giving me lots to think about: details.

I consider myself a detail-oriented person. Let me show you spreadsheets of details and you'd see data in rows and columns, color-coded. However, it seems that I don't convey details well in narrative writing. Probably because I don't like reading it.

Back in high school, I had to read Lord of the Flies. There was a passage about the jungle, and I'm sure I'm remembering this wrong, but one paragraph was longer than one whole page. It took me forever to slog through that passage. Even now, I find myself skipping long paragraphs that are mostly description. Give me action or dialogue and I'll gulp it down, but long descriptions -- ugh.

So adding description and the right details, all from the perspective of the POV character, is proving a bit more difficult that I thought. It's not just describing the setting, but how a character thinks, senses, reacts. A word here or a phrase there can be powerful and add richness. Something I didn't realize that was missing from my writing.

Working with an editor this early in the game was the right thing for me to do.

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