Warning: Spoiler Follows

I’m always looking for examples of feats of writing magic. Here’s one:  Jacquelyn Mitchard’s “The Deep End of the Ocean.”

In order to tell you what it accomplishes, I’m afraid I have to spoil it.

The book is about the kidnapping of a 3-year-old. He resurfaces years later. What struck me about this  book is that Mitchard makes both sides — the family who, naturally, wants the son back, and the people who’ve been harboring him all this time — seem sympathetic.

Any writer who can make a kidnapper sympathetic enough that the reader is torn as to who should have the child is a good writer indeed.

Check it out.

“There are” Better Ways

Today, a simple method to strengthen your writing. My seventh-grade composition teacher taught me this, and it’s stuck like glue ever since: never, ever use “there is” or “there are” if you can possibly avoid it. Exceptions to this exist, of course, but they are fewer and farther between than you may think. “There is” and “there are” constructions almost inevitably weaken your writing.

Examples:

Living Up to My Passion

I turned down a job yesterday. It would have been a good job, and I’d have enjoyed it, but I’d also have obsessed about it. It would have been a distraction, and my history shows that when I get obsessed about a job, the writing goes by the wayside. As I made a decision a year ago to keep the writing at the front of my life, not shelved somewhere, I said “thanks, but no thanks.”

I read recently: “Every time you are faced with a decision, choose in favor of your passions.” (If you’re interested, it was in a book called “The Passion Test” by Janet Bray Attwood and Chris Attwood.) The book was some of the reading I’ve been doing lately designed to help keep me on task and help me keep the faith.

I’m doing several things to push this along:

Turco’s Dialogue

Just finished another writing book. This one was “Dialogue” by Lewis Turco, part of Writer’s Digest’s “Elements of Fiction Writing” series. The series is wonderful: this book, however, is its weakest link. (Sorry, Lewis, but someone had to be.) Part of it is just me — I like my how-to books to be really how-to, and Turco even says he dislikes that and didn’t want to write it that way. That’s his choice. I’m just not sure I learned as much from a protracted dialogue about dialogue as I might have in some other format.

The Truth About Editing

In my nine years’ experience editing (editor of a monthly magazine for seven, freelance editor of books/theses/ papers/articles, etc., since), I’ve found one idea more difficult for new writers to grasp than any other.

Here it is: true editing is absolutely, unwaveringly impersonal. That’s it.

When I edit, I don’t worry about the writer. I worry about the work. I don’t think about whether or not the writer will be upset or elated (yeah, right) at my changes. I think either “that’s well written” and I leave it, or I think “that could be better” and I find a way to fix it. It’s my job to be objective, and one parameter to that objectivity is that my consideration begins and ends with the work.

An Elemental Lesson in Deadlines

Here’s why I haven’t posted for a few days. I write freelance for a little magazine that is published in tandem with a regional newspaper here in Florida. I have an article coming out in their June issue. The editor, whom I’ve known for many years, wanted another article for the next issue.

I stupidly assumed she meant the next issue after the one in which I already have an article appearing, which would be August. What she actually meant was the literal next issue — June. So, naturally, when she asked me in late May how it was coming, I didn’t think much of it — until she followed up with “because I want to be sure I can count on it for June.”

Talk, Talk, Talk

Dialogue is supposed to be hard-working. I always think of dialogue as having at least three functions: it should move the story along (minimally), it should (ideally) tell you something about the speaker, and it should (ideally) tell you something about the person being spoken to.

It has other functions as well, one of them being to break up too much exposition. But I find that I can often spot dialogue that has no other purpose than this, and it annoys me. You’ll recognize it too — you’re reading along, and it’s expos expos expos and suddenly someone asks someone else if they want a cup of coffee, and the someone else says yes or no, whichever, and then it’s expos expos expos again.

Keeping My Head in the Game

I have, by actual count, 345 books on writing, which does not include books of interviews with authors, or “example” books (like plays or mysteries or whatever other genre I’m studying) or “research” books (books about places or times I’m writing about). It also does not include peripheral but related self-help (”get out of my own way”) books.

For me, reading about writing is a fundamental way of keeping my head in the writing game — keeping my attention on it. I find when I read books about writing, I get more new story ideas, more ideas for making what I’m already working on better, and I stay more focused on the whole process than I do if I’m not reading something about the craft.

A Study in the Process

If you’ve read my profile, you know why I’m here. This blog is intended to record the writing process, as difficult and breathtaking as it is, as well as sundry distractions that contribute to the difficulty.

I’m embarking on a second novel. The first is not yet sold, although it is actively being submitted. The two are very different — the first takes place in the South during the Second World War, and is told from the first-person point of view of one character. The second is present-day, third-person, from the points of view of several characters.