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This week: Interior Decorate Your Writing Edited by: Fyn  
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I like my house to be unique to me. Sure, I've bought plenty of things out of a catalog, but the way I put them together in my home is special. You might have bought your sofa at a major home decorating store, but the rug you found at the flea market is so unique, it takes your room from 'carbon copy' to 'simply yours' in no time.~~Nate Berkus
By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: 'I like that' becomes 'I'm like that.'~~Virginia Postrel
I know that the last thing a book wants is to just sit around unread, serving as an element of interior decorating. So when I have people over, all they have to do is glance at my books, and I implore them to take a few home with them.~~Barbara Ehrenreich
My favorite thing about decorating is mixing different periods and styles. If you have something that's old, and you really do want to mix those styles, then you have to add something that's obviously modern with it. You can't put a kind of a mediocre thing in the middle.~~Nate Berkus
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I'm a huge fan of the HGTV Channel and interior decorating. We had a fire a few years back and after all the smoke damage was cleared away, we basically had to redo every room in the house. I was in heaven! This weekend, I was meandering around on Netflix and stumbled across an entire season of David Bromstad's Color Splash. Somewhere around episode eight or nine, it got me to thinking.
The same as a room should be layered in color and fabric, giving it depth and dimension, so too should our writing have pops of color, a unique piece or two, layers of visual textures and a real sense of place. These add so much to any written piece, every bit as much as they do to a well designed room. It is all in the details! A room with blah walls, a couch and a chair or two is boring. Serviceable, but uninteresting.
I remember a professor I had in college. He taught anthropology. He was a rotund, short, mustachioed man who always spoke in a monotone, wore brown, nondescript suits and made the subject about as dry and dusty as the dirt the artifacts were dug up from. It should have been fascinating. He could have brought back to life the far-flung time the pieces existed in, but instead, he simply droned on about weight and age and carbon dating without giving us the substance of a bygone era. I was stuck in his class, but if he'd been a book, I'd never have made it to chapter two. If I hadn't been majorly interested in anthropology and archaeology, I never would have taken another class.
Writing should give the reader a sense of place and time. There should be layers of nuance added to places, events,and the characters so that they can live and breath on the page. The reader should be able to see the dampness of the snow covered leaves, smell the wood smoke of the late fall bonfires and feel the tickle of falling snow. Characters should have depth and dimension, with 'pops of color' quirks, unique lamp characteristics and that cozy throw feel of getting to know someone.
Overall, a book should feel like a well planned home where rooms open to new spaces, where there are exciting nooks to discover and crannies of unexpected delight. A place where windows lead to insights and doors eventually open to reveal new settings. Characters become either friends who we happily invite in or have their own keys or those whom we want to slam the door in their faces because we know they will track in mud, break that favored vase, leave chocolate crumbs on the sofa or spill their Merlot on the white rug. Like the closet in the spare room that is overflowing with all the lose odds and ends that get hidden when company comes, there should be that sense of colorful confusion or catastrophe when the door is unexpectedly opened. Emotions should flow like walking into the house just before Thanksgiving dinner where you are enveloped by feelings of home or the lights go out and you trip over the ottoman you forgot you just added in the living room.
Close your eyes and recall your best friend from high school or an ex...either way, you remember what they looked like and the emotions surrounding them. Characters should become every bit as real and tangible. Sometimes characters need to die to move a story along. You want your readers to feel sad, experience the loss or possibly, depending upon the character, feel that satisfaction that the bad guy got what was coming to them! One should be able to sink into the read like flopping on that perfectly 'floppable' couch or landing on the coziest bed. A new chapter should bloom like the unexpected vase of flowers and events should occur like the moment your eyes land on an unexpected piece of art. Layers and textures should pull you in, patterns should emerge and the whole effect should be as satisfying as curling up in a comfy chair by the fire.
Characters have lives and quirks. There should be cobwebs in the corners, stray dust bunnies under the bed, gleaming wood surfaces, braided rugs or whatever suits the situation. Toothbrushes get dropped on floors, drops of coffee hit the counters or everything is spic and span, but it adds nuance to the people we try to bring to life. Perhaps a character doesn't just pour coffee, but selects a mug from the three layered lazy-susan in the corner cupboard that fits the visitor's mood or situation. Maybe she wears a quilted denim jacket or her jeans are frayed at the knees. Maybe he never removes his cap or she doodles complex pictures when she's nervous. Perhaps he puts cashews on his ice cream or she sprinkles cinnamon sugar on her toast when she misses her mother. Give them textures, build their characters and give them layers just like you have. Let their eyes water when they hear a specific song, have a headache after a perfectly miserable day or oversleep. Let them have moments, good and bad, where we experience their satisfactions, annoyances or glee. Let them get excited about that first magic snowfall, get misty-eyed over missing their dad at a holiday or frustrated when their cell battery dies. Let them get hiccups. But most of all, let them become as real to you as you want them to be to your readers!
Decorate your scenes, dress your characters, design your novel and welcome your readers home. |
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concrete_angel writes: Absolutely fantastic newsletter. I worked in a writing center for a few years, and students brought in absolutely ruinous first drafts expecting the writing assistants to edit for them. Big mistake. I agree with everything you say here. We are responsible for our own improvement. Reviewers may point out errors, but it's up to us to learn from them. When we stop trying to improve, we are no longer writers. I think it was Ernest Hemingway who said that "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." Truer words were never spoken. Our writing will never, EVER be perfect, but it's our responsibility to strive toward perfection until we die.
Yup yup!
Write_Mikey_Write!  says: You make excellent points regarding the revision process. I, too, have reread a supposedly finished piece, only to find some small error that my eyes had simply glossed over. It's a lot of work. By the way, I'm right there with you on your "cyber-copy-gremlins" theory *grin*.
Nasty lil buggers
Quick-Quill  comments: Fyn I am in total agreement, but only when it applies to writers who really want to learn to write well. When offered correction a person needs to take it and apply it. Also Indi-publishers need to either help by giving a short read and review or offer to connect the writer with a editor. Some writers think they are good because their friends are afraid to tell them the truth. I had editors give me a sample review before. I would hire them. I was fortunate to get a great publisher and editor. Book to be released Jan 2015
Congratulations!!!
kaetz adds: Hi Fyn, thanks for the gentle rap over the knuckles... I'm really surprised that you got such a defensive response from a review, it is such a valuable resource to get a review from someone who is an editor/publisher! I saw a funny quote recently: 'It's not "b4" it's "before", we speak English not bingo!' Haha!
Love it!
ENB  says: This was my favorite newsletter of the week! 
Thank you :)
bubblegrum makes the point: Fyn, I agree with you almost, but not quite, 100%. IMHO it is possible to be TOO pedantic about some of these issues - George Bernard Shaw once sent this letter to the Times of London: “There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of time to chasing split infinitives: I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly or to quickly go or quickly to go. The important thing is that he should go at once.” Or, alternatively, Raymond Chandler, "When I split an infinitive, God damn it, it stays split."
IMHO, there is space for some flexibility of language use. Misuse of "your", you're" or even "yore" is not acceptable. I have a pet peeve about the increasing use of "different to" where it should (?must?) be "different from". But I fear it's (not, you will note, its)a losing battle.
The other point I'd like to make concerns the distinction between BrE and AmE. I was acculturated (lovely word) in the UK, so my usage is almost exclusively BrE. But a reviewer recently suggested I'd made a few typos, presumably by inserting a "u" in "favour" or "honour" and saying "realise" rather than "realize". That same Bernard Shaw also said, "America and England are two countries divided by a single language." Now, add Australia into the mix, and the possibilities for confusion multiply. Cobber!
One does need to be aware of the diffeences by region. Myself, I'm from the US, but prefer 'colour' and 'faery'.
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For Authors: November 19, 2014 Issue [#6666]
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