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Joseph E Bird

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Writing Tip – Slow Down

At a recent gathering of the Shelton College Review, three colleagues happened to be writing the pivotal scenes in their novels at the same time.  When submitted to the Review for critique, each scene fell short of the author’s desired emotional affect.

In each case, the advice was the same:  Take your time.  Let the scene develop.  Give the reader the nuances of what’s happening, both in the external environment, but more importantly, in what the characters are thinking and feeling.  The subsequent revisions proved the advice correct.

As the author, you’ve been building up to this moment for the entire book.  You feel it before you even write the scene. The temptation is to get right to the pivotal moment.  But the reader is probably not quite there yet and probably needs a little more time to catch up.  Slow down and embellish.  Let the reader steep in the moment and soak in the importance of what’s happening.  If you do, you’ll have a stronger emotional connection.

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can you summarize your story in a single, compelling sentence?

I was at a conference last week and ran into a friend who knew I was a writer and he asked what I was working on.  I told him I was putting the final touches on my novel Heather Girl.

“What’s it about?”

“Well,” I said, “it’s about a middle-aged woman who is fighting Huntington’s disease and she just learned that her father has been paroled for the murder of her mother.”  As I was saying those words, I realized that it was not a very compelling summary of my novel.  Yes, that’s what it’s about, but why would anybody want to read such an obvious  bummer ?

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s a real feel-good story.”

I failed my elevator speech.  I realized I needed a better way to summarize the story.  How about this?

As her family falls apart and her health begins to fail, Heather Roth searches for answers, but instead finds hope and compassion that give her life meaning.

Ok, so it’s still not going to fly off the shelves like a James Patterson novel, but at least it’s not so ridiculously bleak.

Then, if they want to know more, there’s the cover blurb:

Heather Roth has little to look forward to. Her two sons, who have occupied most of her adult life, have grown and left her alone in the house in which she grew up.  Her ex-husband, for whom she still has feelings despite his abusive nature, lives hundreds of miles away.  And she’s being treated for Huntington’s, a disease that ravaged her mother, and for which she knows there is no cure.

Then the news she wasn’t expecting. Her father is being paroled from prison in Texas where he has been serving a sentence for the murder of his wife, Heather’s mother.

She’ll do anything to keep him out of her life, but when she is forced to take him into her home, she learns that the lives of her family weren’t what they seemed to be.  A story of tragedy and heartbreak, Heather Girl, delivers a whisper of hope and an abundance of compassion, even in the darkest hours.

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Writing Tip: Talk it Out

writing

I’m fortunate to belong to the Shelton College Review, a small group of writers who gather once a week to offer critique and encouragement – both are enormously important for writers – on our works in progress.

In reviewing one of my recent submittals, Larry was saying that he had been so caught up in the narrative, that he forgot that he was critiquing and was simply enjoying the story.  Until, that is, I threw in heaping helping of backstory.  His engagement came to a screeching halt.

I know better than to do that.  It’s one thing to sprinkle in a paragraph or two of backstory, but I took the reader out of a dramatic moment – in the back of an ambulance! – to tell about Heather’s life in high school.  Duh.

Thanks, Larry, for pointing that out. And as painful as that was to hear (that I could be so dumb), it was even harder to fix.  I’ve spent several hours setting things right, hours that I could have been using to write something new.

How did I fix it?

First, I spread it around a little.  Backstory in small doses (a couple of sentences) is acceptable.

Then I let the dramatic scene in the ambulance play out.  After things had calmed down, I worked some of the backstory into dialogue.  Things are still happening.  There’s still tension. There’s still character development as Heather and Lucas talk.  And the reader learns a little bit more about Heather and why she is the way she is.

And then there’s the little problem about coincidences.  More on that later.

 

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