Wilde_Guess

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Hi, Deadman and all. If your writing style is now like your second quote, and not the example in the first quote, you might be making more of a mountain out of rewriting than it really is. I would suggest just doing the rewrite as if the text being rewritten was an outline, and just write it as you would. At the least, the revised text should be better than what it’s replacing, or at least enough better that you can consider the story done. Good luck.

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Since the last post, I’ve re-revised Chapter 1, along with Chapters 3 and 4. I added voice descriptions to each character as they’ve appeared, along with their physical descriptions. I actually should have done a better job with that in the first place, and I had been leaving readers ‘in the dark’ about one of the main character’s appearance for an entire chapter. I’ve also been generous with my use of the thesaurus to vary the speech tags, and make them more accurate, as well as mentioning moods of the speakers. Thanks, all.

I’ve heavily revised Chapters 1, 3, and 4. There aren’t any major plot changes, but I did do some “tightening up” and expanding the story. I’m still working on Chapter 36. If you like the story, but think I could tell it better; or think I’m telling it better than you could possibly imagine, then leave me a review to tell me.how I may improve your reading experience. “It is the tale, not he who tells it.” Stephen King. Thank you in advance for those of you who have read it.

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Hi, BronxWench. The review was from 2018, and only covered Chapter 1.. The reviewer hasn’t posted anything since then. I’ve made minor edits to Chapter 1 and other chapters since then. Since the Archive opened back up last month, I’ve also done and uploaded major edits on the first eighteen chapters, and I’m working through the rest. So for all I know, I might have already fixed at least the worst of it without realizing it. Since the one review is the only review, and since the review was generally favorable, I’m reluctant to delete it. Yet, while I’ve worked on making the story on the page match the story in my mind, I’m not confident that I’ve actually done it. Thanks.

Hi, Desiderius Price. Ough, kay? Take a big chug of ‘F??kitol’ and write a full paragraph monograph or two it is, then. I’ve also been double-checking the speech tags, and changing them up as I’ve revised. Almost all the ‘under eighteen’ main characters speak at above their grade-level to well-above their grade level to at least some degree. The one exception is three years old, and is the younger sister to one of the later-introduced main characters. She’s mostly part of the background, but does speak when she shows up. Reading back to the notes in the review-response, I’ll also try to feed some additional facial expressions in where I can...

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Hi, GeorgeGlass and all. Is that supposed to be some Appalachian kink transferred back to the UK Aristocracy? “Make him Earl like a pig!” perhaps?

Hi all. I’m looking for some suggestions/examples on how to have a first-person narrator describe their own speaking voice without coming off as either a narcissist or being written by a bad author. Why? In the one review I received on Riding the Lincoln Way, the reviewer stated that they believed the first person narrator spoke “robotically,” and in monotone. That is the farthest thing from the way I “hear” that character speak, or for that matter any of the main characters. While all the “under eighteen” characters speak “better than their ages,” they also possess and express the full range of emotions. For example, in the first chapter, four characters actually speak. All four have a “Chicago-midwest” accent and speak English. The “under-eighteen” characters speak in a “natural” register appropriate for their given ages. Otherwise, they match with the examples below. Danny Dvorak (14)—Robert DeNiro in character in a Martin Scorsese film. In real life when not acting, Robert DeNiro does (supposedly) speak like a monotone robot, so no joy there. Danny is also just a little bit of a “wise-ass” and joker, despite his severe looking yet handsome face. He is naturally outgoing. He has a nasty temper. However, since he grew up in a house with two redheads, he’s gotten used to not losing his temper, and thinking things through. Michael Dvorak (13)—Joe Pesci, likewise in-character. While he doesn’t hold grudges, he can become obsessed with things. He’s naturally shy with strangers, but has had to “work” through that shyness more than often enough. Once any “shyness” is done away with, he can be so enthusiastic that he literally takes you along for the ride with him. His temper is near-legendary. It’s also near-unpredictable, since his face naturally portrays happiness, even when he’s actually sad or furious. John Dvorak (37)—Gregory Peck, especially in-character as Atticus Finch from the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Delilah Johnson (16)—Lauren Bacall. Thanks in advance.

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Hi, Thundercloud, and all. I read Chapter 1 of Carmen Elisa Needs to Die. It’s now the second of your stories to make my “recommended reading” and “currently reading” lists, for what that’s worth. Both it and your current story With The Mirror Came… will give me the occasional (and hopefully only the occasional) break from my own original current work, Riding the Lincoln Way. I’m currently working on Chapter 36. In the past week or so, I’ve also given at least light “clean-up” and revision to the first fifteen chapters. With no beta reader and only one one review, that wasn’t easy. As a side note, To Kill a Mockingbird was effectively two stories in one. Her other novel, Go Set a Watchman, was actually written first. When she submitted it, her publisher basically responded, “Great story, great characters, but I can’t print it. Do you have something ‘lighter’ and more “redeeming” with these characters? Maybe you could polish up and knit together the childhood flashbacks?” Thus, Lee wrote her Pulitzer Prize winning first novel. I’ve yet to read Go Set a Watchman, but I have every intention of doing so. I truly enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird when I read it for high school English, unlike some of the dreck that was also assigned. Watchman is the “other half” of Mockingbird, though both are complete novels. Most of the controversy surrounding the late publication of the earlier Watchman centered on the fact that Lee had only relented to publication at the end of her life, well beyond her ability to further refine Watchmen, and according to a few observers under pressure that Lee previously resisted while in her full vigor. Watchmen had also been relatively untouched since the late 1950s, when her editor at Lippincott steered her away from it towards the extracted flashbacks that became Mockingbird. While the literary reviews criticized the work more for the less flattering portrait of Atticus Finch at 72, the fact remains that in 2015, Lee was no longer able to edit and revise the work, which she had put aside untouched and desperately needing revision over fifty-five years previously. Had she polished and published in 1970 or so, I’m sure that Watchman would have also won the Pulitzer Prize. Cheers!

Hi, Deadman and all. No problem. We all started writing at some point or other. And, we’re all still learning to write, too; at least on our better days. Steven King is still learning to write, even having done his self-imposed “10,000 words creatively written about something” mental bench press every day since the 1970s. And I too have my faults. Beyond pulling the occasional Dreiser and writing 5,000 words when 1,000 will work nicely, I sometimes have trouble making my characters speak in their own voices rather than mine, or at least my relative lack of self-confidence has me worry about that. I’m also working on my mechanics, particularly mixing character dialog with action. There is nothing wrong with “killing” a story if you kill it artfully. Just remember to leave yourself an “out,” in case you discover that you’re a later day Arthur Conan Doyle, and you are obliged to start the f???er up again. A “good” author can write both prose and plays. However, like I described in previous posts, prose and plays have different requirements. You can’t write a play “outside of dialog” in anything other than present tense, and other prose only works in past tense. If you start out with prose, you will struggle at least for a moment writing plays of any kind, because the actions of any play are always present tense. Likewise, if you cut your creative writing teeth writing plays, you will struggle with straight prose, since you’re used to describing right f’ing now; and in straight prose, they always had enough time to write a book about what happened. So, present tense in straight prose is right out. Prose will always have a narrator, whether it’s the first person, second (rare as hell, but some masochists do write in it,) or third. Since prose lacks either the moving picture, actor’s visible actions, or the “sound effects people” to portray the non-speaking occurrences, there is always a narrator. Never be ashamed of writing in first person POV. It’s both easier and harder to write well than third person. But if you write first person well, you can truly create something great. Perhaps, you might even write something greater than yourself or the genre in which you write. A comic book and science fiction writer wrote a short story in 1959 entirely in first person perspective, in the then still barely respectable genre of science fiction. However, that author worked with Stan Lee, and proved to be at least his equal, in at least one story. Whether the original short story, or the later full novel, Daniel Keys’ Flowers for Algernon is some of the most powerful prose written in the English Language. Don’t watch the film. I’ve seen better films on a cream-of-mushroom soup, which is truly sad. Read the book! You will either thank or curse me later. However, if you have any capacity for empathy at all, you will have been moved. Cheers!