Thursday 7 October 2010

Some people can be taught but never learn 07th October 2010.

I went to my writing club last night, a bit of intelligence gathering to be honest, since the guest speaker was another publisher who was going to explain how he worked. Interesting to see how another small press magnate (LOL) worked so I sat in the middle of the audience as he outlined how he did what he did and why.

As it happens his business plan and ours don’t really overlap in any real sense so I relaxed and enjoyed the flow. He’d brought a couple of his authors along who proceeded to outline why they had done what they did and then read out a sample section of their respective books. One was good, a contemporary book, with a real sense of humour in it, the guy could write.

The other one stopped me cold and I am certain by the end of her reading my tongue had teeth marks all over it. Now she wasn’t there for a critique of her work and to be fair her words did paint a picture, you could visualise the scene.

What I found really difficult to swallow though was a serious issue with what she’d actually written, a technical error that was so glaring it stood out. This is in a published book, with the publisher sitting next to her, just after she finished describing how she’d completed her master’s degree in creative writing – hence the title of this blog entry. It was gratifying to find a number of the club members sitting in the bar during the interval discussing the very same point.

Despite being taught creative writing, she’d broken one, if not two of the cardinal rules of fiction. Firstly you must show the reader what is happening, and when writing in the third person singular, you can show the reader what your view point character is thinking.

This author broke both with a repetitive series of sentences in the excerpt she read out. She consistently told the reader (or in this case an audience of listeners) what the viewpoint character was not thinking.

How can you possibly show your reader what your view point character was not thinking about?

Sure, you can do it by dialogue between the two people in the scene along the lines of “what will your wife think” followed by “I’m not thinking about her” but not in narrative form about his thoughts.

She didn’t do this once, but several times within the page.

Clearly this manuscript hadn’t been edited to an acceptable standard and was eminently correctable, and this author has a master’s degree in creative writing? What were the editor and/or publisher thinking about? Perhaps now you can see what I meant about teaching and learning.

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