Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Looking Deeper

Looking Deeper

Today was a busy day on the farm. To begin with I had to take one of the cars in for servicing. Then the technician came from Best Buy to install a new router. The old one that is part of my WIFI went on the fritz. Then the exterminators came. I finally got my latest shooter game to load and fooled around with it for about an hour. We have been very busy this week. Tomorrow I will take the other car in for servicing and I think we will go on to Madison and visit Barnes and Nobles.

I normally trade my daily driver car in when it hit’s the 100,000 mile mark. I like to find something that has about 20,000 miles on it and is a few years old. That way I get it for about a third of what it cost new. I know, I must sound like a cheapskate but when you are retired and living on a fixed income you compensate for a reduced cash flow by thinking more about how you spend those limited resources. Anyway I might take Linda looking for a used car that has low mileage.

I get a good amount of feedback, usually in the form of a personal email and I get to see how people think, respond and react. Actually a blog response is little more than a glimpse of what the writer thinks, sort of the very tip of the iceberg that only suggests as to what lies deep beneath the surface providing the real motive force for the comment. Still I try not to read too much into them but rather accept them at face value and try and respond accordingly.

What I am finding is that much of what I say is out of the mainstream of what most have to say on the craft. I have a half dozen references I particularly like and use these as the underpinning of what I say about writing, however I need to stress that what I write in these blogs is to sharpen my own understanding more than trying to influence the attitudes of others. When you try and “teach” something a writer goes to a lot more trouble thinking things through than what otherwise might be the case.

Anyway one of the comments I got was from a reader that said she is constantly hearing the comment of the importance of learning the “Craft” but those who offer that advice don’t always have much to say about what that really means. Actually there is much written on the subject but many developing writers haven’t gotten very far beyond just trying to emulate some of the better works they have seen written.

When we read something we do it at at least two levels. The first is just sitting back and enjoying the story. If its good and entertaining we usually just wallow in the ambience of soaking in a good tale. Nothing wrong with that. However, if you are really interested in why it is a good tale you read it a second time to see how it was crafted. In my experience it is very unusual for someone to do this.....taking the story telling model and seeing how it was followed in a given work. In an earlier blog I used the Screen Play “Real Steel” to show how I do this but that is an interest I developed only after years of reading solely for enjoyment.

An aspiring writer however should take a closer look at what they read and enjoy to learn what it is about the piece that they particularly liked and how the writer went about achieving it. For newer writers the focus is generally on the art, where they look at exposition or dialogue they found particularly moving or sharp and cleverly bantered. While this is worthwhile it is also useful to look at the model and see how the science was followed. Did the Central Character (CC) appear early, was the CC Central, was this someone easy to attach to and relate to…. Did you get a good before during and after snapshot… was there a story beneath the story? Yada, yada yada…all that stuff that is subliminal in a first read begins to come into focus when you take a closer look. This is what people refer to when they talk about the craft and there are many references that go on and on about explaining how it works.