Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Advanced Review Techniques

Contrasts, Repetition, Constants in advanced writing.

I have some recurring dreams….In one I am a boy in a small village in France where I lived when my father was assigned there in the service…In another it is a subdivision outside the gate where we used to live in Norfolk…Sometimes I wonder why these scenes reoccur in my dreams….There was nothing traumatic that took place….oh well.

Had a spirited exchange with a member over several of my blog entries…no it wasn’t one of my detractors…or a fan either…it was someone I admire as a writer and we kicked around the idea of reviews a little… it was cool.
It got me to thinking about some of the advanced review techniques I’m working on…One is Contrasts, another is repetition, and a third is constants. Since I have no formal training as a writer I am sure my readers are groaning….Get back under your mushroom Percy…these have been around forever….get real. Well what might not appear new to most are new to me so I’m warning you in advance so you can take your truck to the other end of the sand lot.

In this great story a friend of mine came up with…I was using the Outline technique to explore her work. First I did an outline of her version and then I did an outline of where the story seemed to have a natural inclination to go. The story she wrote seemed to follow a trend common to the story telling technique of many other talented writers I follow on writing.com.

This technique is to get an idea and start pushing the pencil to follow your muses inspiration from beginning to end. I am sure many great stories have been written in this manner…but if you do an outline you will see that many of these attempts meander about buffeted by this or that and fall short of the bullseye their potential offers.
(See if I ever ask you to review something of mine again….JERK! a voice whispers from afar…”Sorry dear friend,” I reply…” I have a compelling desire to share what I’m learning.” how dumb is that?)

Where was I? Oh yes at contrasts….in this story of hers I thought the author was trying to say too much..that she would have been better served to let the contrasts do the showing for he…for example let the contrasts show the passage of time in her character…it starts when the main character is young and ends when she is an old lady….Let the reader connect the constant of the daughter’s eyes with the constant of her dead lovers…..let the repetition in the advice given by her grandmother pop up again at the end in the advice she gives her own daughter. In the two outlines there is no connection in the authors original but in the outline of the review these become self evident enhancments and get plugged in…They have a powerful effect on the reader and give the story an added sense of wonder and elegance.

Anyway it’s a great story regardless of if it wins the contest and like the recurring thread of the dream locations of my youth…this story of hers keeps cycling through my brain…It distracts me from writing chapter 15 of my Novella….Teresa gets pushed out the window (Oh my Gawd!) and while I have tried not to get too attached to her since I knew this was coming from the beginning, I'm none the less easily dissauded (is that a word?) from writing it.