Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Outline Review

The Outline Review:

Recently I read a story a member had written that had an extremely powerful story line…we corresponded back and forth as I grew more excited as to the potential it offered. It was hard to express in an existing review format where the story was leading….I didn’t want to do another Second Edit review because I liked the way she was telling the story and didn’t want to spoil her groove or change the momentum.

In response I drafted an outline that showed where I thought the story was leading and sent it. The outline explained what I saw as a more optimal structure without getting into word choice issues which are always sensitive to a talented and aspiring writer. This Outline review showed exactly what I was getting at in a macro context and the writer stepped back, took another look and rewrote the piece…which was much improved.

While working on this on and off for several days and dreaming several nights as the composition bubbled in my slow bio-processor I began to see things in the work that are common to anyone’s compositions and for some reason are simply hard to try and explain.

The first of these is learning to underwrite…to say less instead of more, to ruthlessly go back and strip out every non-essential word or phrase. To choose words with care, selecting just the right one. A detractor of mine stated this very well in the forum last week and I won’t repeat here, the valid points he expressed….(While I have the capacity to separate pepper from rat poop, there remains some conflict between my personal and objective POV. )

However it went beyond word choice…It got into contrasts, repetition and writing in a way that allows a reader an opportunity at discovery…for the reader to think….“Ah hah! That dumb narrator hasn’t figured it out but I know exactly what is going to happen….” Of course the writer has been subtly foreshadowing…dropping clues which in a romance novel are different than a mystery novel. In a romance novel the clues suck the readers in while the momentum of the story carries them along so the light comes fully on at the instant the author wants it to. In mystery the clues give the reader an opportunity to solve the puzzle before the story ends. The difference as I see it is that one provides a vicarious interface with the reader and the other offers an intellectual challenge. Now how in the heck do you explain that to someone?

Then there was foreshadowing and repetition…A reader hears a phrase early on….it repeats itself in the middle and at the end it appears again as symbols clash and the roof collapses.

Or contrasts….We see one thing early in the story, it evolves into something else and winds up in its final form. The three different contrasts in the story show the reader as much as the actual words of description. Then like contrasts there are constants that continue to show up that while there is change there is also stability in the order of the cosmos.

Further there are evocative symbols that are shown early , later in the body and finally at the end.

All this has to be structured and integrated and presented with a light touch to the reader that transcends showing and telling but allows the reader to become part of the story and develop a powerful emotional attachment…

Anyway the Outline review offers possibilities for communicating that structural interconnectivity of advanced writing techniques that traditional review tools can’t get to....without trying to use a slotted screwdriver when what you need is a Phillips Head.