After I came back from my critiques, I still had some questions. Ones that I didn’t think mattered until I reached my second draft. But a professional writer, writer of fantasy books, offered to help me decide which critique is more accurate. The big thing to understand is that neither of my critique partners write in a similar fashion to me. Hard to know if they simply were biased and couldn’t help it.

So I sent off my submission to my third critique partner, but I couldn’t help myself. I took the criticism that I thought was valid and I rewrote/edited, before I sent it off. Then, after doing all that extra work I took a hard look at my storyline and decided that ultimately, none of this would probably show up in the final manuscript. Because my main character has changed, this part of the tale is outside the scope of useful information.

I guess it’s good. It’s simply going to serve as clean evaluation of my style. Practice for the real thing. But also disappointing. Hard work, the most edited section, all for naught. So it goes.

I think writing is so difficult a process. I keep hoping that with each successive edit things are getting better, getting tighter. I swear every time I go to change something, I end up working for hours as I find other things to modify. If it turns out that my edits simply make things different–and not substantially better… God knows, that’s another thing that weighs on my mind.

I wonder, really wonder, why that is. When I write a post or in my personal journal, I’m still telling you something. It’s still a story of sorts. It deals with emotion and thought. But fiction is different. Grammar and structure doesn’t seem to get in the way when I’m over here. Grammar and structure mean a lot more over there. Over here I can just say what I think, what I feel–it works in its own fashion.

Over there it’s more difficult to say my character X is angry. There is a bigger, more nuanced choice of words–furious, upset, mad, annoyed. And then I have to show you what that means–she’s quiet, she’s yelling, she’s glaring at someone, she’s set her drink down and it rattles the desert spoon….

Hard, hard, hard….damnably hard. Everything matters over there. Every choice of word matters. The order in which you say things matters. The tense of the verb, the form of the adjective…don’t kid  yourself. If you’ve ever read something and thought–”I can write better than that.” Try it. Not for a short story, for a novel length piece of fiction. It’s very, very hard to do. Especially if you are like me and have an understated style.

I am quite poetic somehow in other styles of writing. But my fiction writing is always direct. I use great restraint with my words when I write fiction. Probably to my detriment. I lack the poetry of prose–except in dialog. That is the only place where true beauty might be found. It’s like I’ve saved it all up for the moments that matter the most, so that you might remember only the things that matter.

Still…you may never get to those moments…I may lose you far earlier if I truly am so uncharming in my restraint. Some people find it refreshing, vivid because I’ve left so much to your own interpretation–but other people simply can’t get into my style. There isn’t enough there.