Editing and Reading Observations… Part 6…

Kris and I Have Fun Brainstorming…

These days it is usually over lunch, working out stuff we need to talk about in a workshop. (We never talk about our own writing… just never… she has no idea what I am working on and I have no idea what she is working on… You all should protect your own writing in the same way.)

But we do talk a lot about publishing and teaching, all the time actually.

Tonight I was sitting here at my business computer, getting ready to work on a publishing product when Kris walked by and mentioned the series of Editing and Observations I have been doing. And I asked her if she had more comments about what she is seeing in her reading of Holiday Spectacular stories.

And for the next ten minutes, as she went in and out of her office, she would toss me another thing she noticed, and I would expand on it on a note pad if it fit what I was seeing as well.

So got a number more of these posts coming. Remember, I am not talking about any one writer or story. These are general to help you with future stories.

Tonights two things that both Kris and I see regularly…

AUTHOR PICKED THE WRONG CHARACTER TO TELL THE STORY… 

As readers we all see that at times when we think, “Wouldn’t that other character be so much more interesting?”

Writers figure this out at times and then suddenly white space and change characters without cutting off the first boring character. (Early stage professionals have issues with chopping off done work, even though it does not fit with what you are writing.)

We all start with the wrong character at times, sometimes wrong tense, and the creative voce just pushes us to the right place. (Just recently I was writing along on a story and discovered I had floated to a different character POV. That’s usually a sign of this problem. I cycled back, realized my original character needed to be there, creative voice did not want it cut, and I just left the entire float. No one will notice.)

But wrong character to tell the story is a common thing both Kris and I see.

TSTL….

This is a romance term which means the character is “Too Stupid To Live.” I always know I have run into this problem when I say out loud while reading, “Seriously.” Then I quit reading and send the story back.

I see this in one out of ten stories.

The key to help your creative voice learn this is to pay a little more attention when you are reading. What makes you put a story or book down. Granted, you don’t have the millions of stories read that Kris and I do, but you can start getting the idea by just paying attention.