3. December 2010 by Gore Wehner.

Dear starting out writer:

I’m thrilled you are considering penning a book, a short story, or even begun to blog. The world needs more eager storytellers.

But if you’ve never penned a story before in your life, don’t expect the one that you are about to write will be the one to launch your spectacular writing career.  You will be a lot smarter and happier to consider this one “practice.”

David Kazzie has placed a video on YouTube called “So You Want to Write a Novel.” The clever little skit can also be found on his site: http://wahoocorner.blogspot.com/ It really is funny to those of us who’ve spent the last twenty years (or so) reading and perfecting our craft.

So to someone starting out: Go ahead and work your story to death. Get each paragraph right. Study conflict and tension. Read all about beginnings and endings. Focus on character development, the character arc, the voice. Rewrite as needed. Spend a year on it if you must.

Then put it away.

Begin a new project, using everything you’ve learned. Move forward. Take classes. Go to writer’s conferences.  Join a writer’s group and get and give feedback. Learn, learn, learn.

This, too, will be practice.

Maybe your third project will be ready. Maybe. If you’re a quick study and you’ve used every spare moment to understand the craft. Think of it this way. If you’ve never played the piano, what makes you think you can dive into a rendition of Billy Joel’s “Good-bye Yellow Brick Road”? After learning the song and practicing everything from getting the rhythm right to hitting the right keys in the right order, that doesn’t mean you can play “Uptown Girl,” right? You still don’t understand the piano. You simply managed to practice that particular song until you could make it right. But to be able to play other songs you must understand how music works.

Make sense?

So believe me when I say this: Put in the time, and you will have something worth writing about.

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3. December 2010 by Gore Wehner.

There’s an interesting phenomenon going on in Wanna-Be-An-Authorland. Because I’ve been critiquing for a wide variety of writers lately, I’ve been noticing a trend. It’s almost an art form, really. People are over writing their work to the point where I can’t understand what the heck is going on with it.

It goes a little something like this:

Martin lay a puckered and dimpled hand on the moth-eaten, time-worn arm of the tapestry and mahogany armchair, a once-upon-a-time lavish gift from his estranged but pulchritudinous ex-wife whose moxie once matched his own. Stroking the paisley textile with velvet touches, he mused that at one time he’d cherished this resplendent portion of the past and now it haunted his evenings, its shadow a lamentable melancholy phantom on the grooved yellow rose-printed wallpaper.

What’s wrong with this paragraph? Actually, it’s not as confusing as some I’ve read…but it does take forever to say that Martin feels the armchair is a ghost of his past. If I read a story with pages and pages  of long, descriptive sentences like this, very likely I’d  fall asleep.

I won’t argue that many classics were written in this manner. But when was the last time you read a book written by a new author that listed every detail that might or might not be of any importance to the story?

Keep in mind, less is more. Description can be like a dam, blocking the flow of your story. Details are wonderful when not redundant, when they don’t create run-on sentences that are difficult to read, and when they propel the story forward. And I can’t stress the “propel the story forward” part enough. Keep things moving. Do not build a dam.

In other words…do not dam your story. Pun intended.

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