When you’re a writer, feedback can be mind-boggling. I’m at work on a short story which will soon be published in an anthology. Another contributor, who has experience in editing, is helping me out in her spare time by giving some hints along the way.
It has been awhile since any of my writing has gotten such thorough scrutiny where a college final grade wasn’t involved. Writing assignments for college is no less difficult than putting this short story together because, even though I won’t have to worry about getting credits for a degree, it’s important for the story to be an effective part of the rest of the collection.
Yeah, I’ve got work to do, and my editor let me know it.
The stumbling block for me now is the viewpoint in which the story takes place. It has been the topic of two writing group meetings I’ve facilitated, and even I can’t get a handle on it. The story started with a third person viewpoint (“The man came into the house.”) The suggestion was to do first person (“I went into the house.”) This involves cleaning up the story to adjust all the nouns and verbs, zapping any passive phrases with the writer’s equivalent of bug spray (the delete button) and making sure the characters all have names and purposes.
When I delivered the story in third person, one character was simply “the guard captain.” Now that the story is in first person, I realize that no idiot keeps calling somebody by their occupation, so I had to come up with a name for him. I wasn’t ready to name the guard captain. I had spent considerable time in the office deciding on a new system password (we update them every 90 days or when somebody thinks it’s a good idea after drinking too much energy boost). After so many years at a company, one runs out of family birth dates, pet names and car models to use for passwords, especially when there is a list of a dozen or more for every program in use. What I won’t do is use my character names as passwords. Since I wasn’t thinking about character names, I wasn’t prepared to give the guard captain a name, but I did, and I like it. Now I have to search for and replace all references with the new name and make sure the story doesn’t suffer for it.
When I sent a revision of my new viewpoint story in progress, my friendly editor reminded me of the rules of writing and where I had broken them. Right she was; they were incorrect because I am still revising them. It will make sense soon, but I had been staring at the story through about a jillion revisions in third person, and after revision one in first person it looks like a jillion more are coming my way before it will be ready.
So with crossed eyes, headache, swollen feet and parched throat, but still with the burning ember of hope for success keeping my body temperature at 98.6 degrees, the lonely author will approach the story again and attempt to successfully tackle point of view. When I get it right, I’ll let you know, too.
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 