Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Tag: writing

• Exchanging Papers

  Posted at 2:27 am by kayewer, on April 8, 2012

  I’ve been committed to an anthology being assembled by a group of women I’ve worked with for over a decade.  We’ve been at this particular project for some months now, and we’re at the stage at which the final manuscript is taking shape.  It was hard to part with my contribution, because the minute the writing leaves your hands, it’s like sending your child off to summer camp for the first time.  It’s a type of separation anxiety that only writers can feel.

  A short story like mine takes time to develop and nurture.  When I finally let go, another member of our team dropped me an email and offered to proofread for me.  I’m happy for the feedback and the second pair of eyes, because the DIY process becomes harder the longer you’re at it.  Once you have looked at your work 200 times, everything starts to look like drivel and you can’t look objectively any longer.

  A problem I’ve had with word processing is that documents tend to open on page one, even if I stopped typing on page 15.  This leads to a desire to read from page one all over again until I got back to where I left off.  I became so obsessed at one point that I began looking at the sequence of actions in the story to make sure my characters were not sitting down in paragraph one, and sitting down again in paragraph two, without the requirement of standing up or doing something other than sitting down somewhere inbetween.

  I recently shredded the editing copy on which I had noted “sat,” “stood,” “fell down” and other such margin scribbles, and then I ran a fresh one to look for overusage of favorite words.  One of my favorite authors has always stood out when I read her books because of a pet word, “miasma,” which has cropped up enough that I have noticed it.  It’s a harmless quirk, and because her work is historical fiction, there are plenty of chances for there to be a miasma description.  Usually it’s a plague or mid-summer ozone tainted by poor sanitary conditions.  Maybe, though, it’s the cloud of doubt that makes writers like me not want to let go their manuscripts.

  Other than dutifully using “said” in dialogue, I’m not sure if I have a pet word in my writing, but my volunteer editor will surely spot it if one does exist, bless her heart.  Or, if she wants this to all be over, she’ll smile and say nothing, because we are all writing with that same attention to detail, and in each of our manuscripts we see our own little obsessive shortcomings.

   

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged critiquing manuscript, editing manuscript, writer, writers group, writing

• The Period in the Paragraph

  Posted at 2:04 am by kayewer, on April 1, 2012

  When you’re a writer, your work becomes your young and you have to go through the parenting cycle.  A story starts out as a sentence, which you begin dressing up with all its special clothing.  I always start with a diaper, because I need something to catch all the poo that issues from a first draft.

  One has to feed a writing project with all the proper verbs, nouns and sentence structure.  Of course you’d like to take your child out in a stroller or carrier, but this baby is a solo project; if you show off a work in progress, your family will love it even if it is full of poo, and your friends will be afraid to tell you it’s homely because they feel it will develop as it ages.  In this case, they’re probably right.

  If the story starts to talk, it’s gibberish at first, but once you’re past terrible page two it starts refusing things you want it to do and makes demands.  Your stream of consciousness at three in the morning reads like a temper tantrum by the time you get around to reading it at noon the next day.

  You give it a physical with spell check, even though it’s a pediatrician no parent really trusts.  You innoculate it with anti-virus or protect it with a cloud as it grows, matures, rebels, and drives you batty.  Finally, you sit and take a look at your child and wonder if it is really what you started out to do.  You try to buy what you think are nicer clothes for it, dressing it up in prosy description or pleading to just let you cut a little off the top.

  Finally it’s ready to go out on its own.  The last words are spoken and you put a period at the end.  It may not get married or get a degree, but it will let you know how it is doing once in awhile when it gets noticed and does well enough to send some money home.  Unless you’re writing an expose’ and then you get sent all its dirty laundry.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment | Tagged short story writing, writing

• About a Theme

  Posted at 2:13 am by kayewer, on August 7, 2011

  I am still working on the writers group anthology project.  We’re trying to come up with a theme, and I think I have one.

  Which also means I’m ready to face the idea firing squad when I share it with the rest of the group.

  When posing an idea to a group, the outcome is as unpredictable as using eight-sided dice with one side damaged.  That, naturally, is the side that always comes up.

  Sometimes your idea results in a blank stare, as if you’ve just magically spoken Lithuanian.  That silence is then broken by one person who says “Hmmmm” contemplatively.  The group pessimist may respond that it’s too much of something or too little of another.  The person who is the designated opinion to end all opinions may decide either way depending on which side of the hammock they fell out of that morning.  Just because you meet to exchange ideas doesn’t mean everybody is ready for them.  If your coffee hasn’t kicked in, the best ideas on the table might as well have been unsaid.

  In other words, just like in our government, nobody seems to agree on anything anymore.

  I don’t know what is so darned inconvenient about making concessions in life, so we can set a standard that might work well for the most people.  Sure, in a population as large as ours, for every 100 people given an idea on which to vote, 45 may totally agree, 15 may be on the fence, 10 will hate it and 30 will vote with their alliance, which could be anybody among the other 70.

  The ten who hate the idea won’t want to change their lives one iota to accommodate something new.  The allies don’t like to go against their gang.  It’s the other 15 who make or break an idea, because with the changes come suggestions from all sides, and some of them will alienate 1/2 to 1/3 of those 15 on the fence.  So as those swing votes go, there goes your majority.

  We have five people to vote on a theme for our anthology.  The first round of voting went about as well as the last two weeks in Washington as our supposedly elected representatives of the vox populi tried to iron out a deal that would cover our debts after we apparently (when and how, I don’t know) went to Chinese lenders for money we couldn’t pay (or something like that).

  But I digress.  Sometimes an anthology doesn’t have a unifying theme (unless you’re writing for a certain spiritual soup series of books), but other ideas have been panned curtly as not being suitable, and we can’t move forward without one.  Theme means the title, and the title makes or breaks sales.

  Mine will be simple.  I’ll put it to the group.  I don’t know how they will vote, but I’m ready to be rejected.  I’m a writer, so I should be prepared for that.  Maybe it will be a good idea that gets panned, or a bad one that gets the okay because everybody voted with their alliance.  Who knows.  I’ll suggest it anyway.

  It’s not as if I’m agreeing to a loan from China.

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  Posted in Commentary | 0 Comments | Tagged anthology, book title, theme, writers group, writing

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