A Writer's Notebook: Blue Plastic

Let's try something different here: a completely random and spontaneous collection of thoughts about writing and the writer's life. In no particular order today...

Few of those who know us personally can believe that we might have real talent or maybe something greater still. Almost everyone thinks about writing a book--and what a beauty it will be! But they never get around to it for a few hundred reasons. The writers they love are all strangers, blessed not with more talent but more money and time and connections. They're not marred by our own flaws or plagued by our personal demons. So it's possible to admire their work and find within it an excuse for procrastinating or giving up completely.

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Never judge a book by its cover? Puh-leeeeeze! We don't have much choice these days with a million-odd books coming out every year. The covers are a wilderness of signs coming at us at dizzying speed. Recently, a stranger sent me two of her self-published books as a prize for a contest I'd thoughtlessly entered. To this day I haven't read them. I gave one of the two a five-page look and the pages weren't bad. But I couldn't get past the two bland boilerplate front covers or the amateurish copy on the back. The covers discouraged me from reading on, and made me doubt the author's commitment to her craft or her ability to deliver the goods.

From Russell Blake, I learned the importance of redoing covers, if necessary, until we get them right. I tried doing my own when I started publishing online. Since then, I've redone all of them, sometimes more than once. Yes, it costs money, but the dough is well spent. After all, readers deserve our best and we're being judged at a glance.

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We're told to steer clear of wordplay or verbal pyrotechnics, a word we also shouldn't use cuz some might have to look it up. The stated theory is this: nothing should distract the reader's attention from the story itself. I say the 'stated theory' because I have my own theory: that those who hold this are quick to condemn what they lack. And what's that? Not a sense of humor, certainly. I mean a mental quickness, the power to perceive and to pounce on connections that many others miss.

Come on, really. After all, one of the greatest literary thrillers dared to rope us in with this:L

'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.'
--Nabokov

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Moving on now. We all know the importance of proofing our work carefully. No, more than carefully: obsessively! And so we try harder...and harder...proofing 5, 6, 7 times! Still, time and again, more of the damned little beasties slipped through: a missing or a double period, a typo, a computer glitch, etc. Even the most tolerant readers will come to regard these as sand in their eyes, each grain a further betrayal of trust.

In my continuing education, I tried two experiments. And here is my report:
1) The free version of Grammarly will do wonders for your essential proofing, from typos to spellos to word wrongos to missing Oxford commas.
2) But Grammarly Premium is the one to get, even if you have an editor. GP will reduce your real editor's work, thereby reducing your cost. It will point out if a word or phrase is tired. If a word should be missing, and thus not picked up by Spellcheck, it will question the sense of the sentence. It will offer alternatives to a word that doesn't seem quite on the button.

That said, when the manuscript has been put through GP,  I've learned the imperative of having beta readers who are familiar with my work. Nothing is better than that kind of beta for catching inconsistencies within a series of books or for pointing out back story needed--and back story that can be shortened or scrapped.

                                                                   
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One final point, for now, on rewriting. This new book has taught me that it's only in part about cutting. My final draft is always about half the original length. But in my quest for pith, I learned, now and then I scrapped things that readers had to know: a character's reaction, for instance, or a telling detail.

Here's just one example.

In the book, Starr is 'working' the town bouncer in a bar. She lies in claiming that her husband often can't perform at night. The bouncer commiserates. He knows what she means, he says, though his definition of ED couldn't be more wrong. In the original text, Starr says only, "That's it."

Readers, I'd thought, would see a droll, superior look in Starrs's eyes. But, in fact, they were just as likely to think Starr didn't know any better.

I added instead of subtracting:
Starr cries as if enlightened, "Right! I should've guessed it's got a name!"

Not perfect, no, but clearer.

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Well, that's it for today. If the interest is there, we'll come back to this notebook again. Then I'll tell you how the receipt of a blue plastic item dovetailed with my research for the next book and kickstarted the outline. It's an explosive illustration of synchronicity in writing.