Thursday, November 10, 2005
air quotes vacation
I'm on
"vayCAYshun" until next Thursday. But that's an air quotes vacation because tomorrow my son has no school and no day care and Monday-Wednesday I'll be reading madly for school and writing. I'm about 1/4 of the way through Ellison, liking it a lot.
I'll be guest blogging on
Marjorie Liu's blog tomorrow. No pressure. None at all. Oh well. Speaking of pressure, A Darker Crimson is #26 on the Neilsen bookscan top 100 romances. I should be happy dancing about that and all I can think is - what happens next week when it plunges out of sight?
Today in class one student was brave enough to offer up a paragraph from her story for an editing exercise I think can be quite instructive. Take a passage of a decent size, something without dialogue, and then remove all modifiers. All of them. Every adjective, adverb etc. And then take a look at what's left. Are there sentences that make no sense without the missing words? Which ones are stronger? Weaker? Now that you're down to bare structure, does the structure hold up? Did the image you were going for rely entirely on modifiers? Now, put back the ones that are necessary for a sentence to be coherent. Ask the questions again. What's flat? What's not? Why? Have you really truly said exactly what you meant?
KNOW which words are working for your image and why. Put back the words that must be there for the image to be what you want. Are you using the same words as the ones you removed? The point is not that such words are bad, plainly, they're not. Try. See what happens. It's just an exercise to make you think about what you're writing, not an anti-modifer rant.
