Editing Continued – the next revelation

I left you last with the question of how I made my writing come alive. Well, to be fair, I should let future readers judge if it is actually alive or just pretending. But, to me it’s more lively. Anyway, around that time, I attended my first writer’s workshop. It was a real grown up affair with tea and coffee and bowls of pistachios for nibbling and best of all – did not include a toddler. Call me horrible if you want, but for four days, I talked to adults all day long! So without regard to the quality of the workshop, I was in heaven before I even walked in the door. The door incidentally, led to the Vander Zee Gallery. Double heaven. In moments when my brain was tired, it could just wander away through the mysterious gateways of the art. My favorite place? The Birch trees with blue leaves by a river. I think that the river was off the edge of the canvas, but I knew it was there since I dabbled my feet in the water.

Anyway, back to the workshop. It was taught by David Hazard, who I had met a couple weeks before when he gave a free workshop to artists on writing Artist Statements. There were seven participants and I will tell you that I was intimidated right off. Most of the people were writing books about their life experiences or historical accounts of their amazing ancestors or real world military policy. What was I writing? A fantasy about kids going on a scavenger hunt. (Yeah, I know, when I put it like that, you don’t much want to read my book either.) But that is how I felt, like I wasn’t worthy to be there. So whenever we went around the room to talk about our projects, I would dumb it down and make it seem as insignificant as possible. I guess I was thinking that if they weren’t interested in my project, they wouldn’t look closer and then start to ask themselves why I was there. Of course, I soon realized I was being stupid. I paid a lot of money to be there to improve my writing. I was there for me, not what someone else might think. Now, before you get all up in arms about literary snobs, I would like to point out that this all went on inside my insecure little head and everyone in the workshop was kind, supportive and interested. So I forced myself to speak up and share and even confess my insecurities so that I could get the most out of the workshop. I won’t go into all the details nor do I wish to give away all of David’s tips and strategies for writing (you will just have to take his workshop yourself), but I learned two very important things.

First, to bring my writing alive, I had to bring it down into the body. That is advice directly from David. Instead of saying ‘she was scared’ you might say ‘her hair follicles tingled and her legs tensed, ready to run.’ I know that seems like ‘show, don’t tell,’ and I think it falls in that category, but it is much more focused and allows you to climb inside the POV character. After learning this, suddenly I could see where my writing lacked that luster to really make it shine and come alive. I don’t know if I am there yet, but it really made me see what I had written in a different way. So if you are reading my current draft, I believe you would be able to pick out the point where I had that revelation.

The second thing I learned is still a growing and changing thing, but in the end will help me create my elevator pitch and speaks to the theme of the story. We were doing an exercise where we were visualizing our target audience and trying to come up with descriptions of our book that would catch their interest. I was having a hard time with this because fantasy readers are a very diverse crowd of people and not all types of fantasy appeal to all fantasy readers. Again I felt like a little kid in the class, mumbling that I didn’t know the answer when the teacher called on me. The others had pretty specific target audiences: divorcees, children’s history teachers, but not me. So I laid it all out there and the group helped me come up with ideas. Not all of them were applicable, but there were a few that were spot on and one that really stuck out. “You can’t save someone who is addicted to power.” Suddenly that put a whole new view on personality on one of my characters. So as I write his actions and the reactions to those actions (which in the first draft just happened) there is purpose behind them.

So I discovered two very important things in the work shop that changed my editing process: how to bring my writing to life and the theme for my book. I also learned many other things that were applicable, but I thought I would wait until the next round of edits to incorporate them so I didn’t get over whelmed. I edited along smoothly until I hit a road block -  a crossroads chapter. It seemed so fake and vanilla and not realistic. I didn’t know what to do, but we’ll save that for the next post.