The act of snippeting a work-in-progress is a tempting thing to many of us, especially we the new writers. We create something that feels good, looks good, makes up happy with our talent, so of course we want to share. Thing is, there's this wonderful little law of nature regarding writing that states: The more excited you are about something, the more likely you'll see glaring errors in it as soon as you post it publicly.
That, my friends, is the dread disease of Writer Vision: being blinded to obvious errors by your own enthusiasm until you have thrown it out on the sidewalk for everyone to see.
Ouch.
I recently posted a Snippet to Julie Czerneda's SFF newsgroup just for fun. It wasn't a part of any ongoing story, other than as a brief, formless idea for an urban-fantasy short. The snippet hounds in the group made baying sounds aplenty, for which I was truly grateful, but on the second or third time through, I realized with a jolt that the first full paragraph was a complete train wreck of mishmashed jibberish. I'm quite certain that if an editor saw it, the MS would have been round-filed, physically or electronically.
Now I know I read that little snip through four or five times before I posted it, because I edited it every time. Yet, there it was, staring at me on the screen, a complete mess.
Well, that happens a lot with work-in-progress snippets, so I have not let it get me down. Still, it served as a good lesson: Always wait a bit before sharing.
As an object lesson, the paragraph was:
Arguile glanced at Timmots' shadowed form. His brother-hunter's cloak drankin the wan yellow light the streetlights cast into the fog. He could notdeny the observation. Only on a night such as this could the boundariesbe weakened. The curtain of mist tinged with scents of mid-summer and wrappedin the midnight silence of sleeping humanity would draw their prey as surelyas fresh meat drew lions.
I've been working on rewriting it, but I haven't gotten it quite where I want it to be yet. The whole scene was inspired by one of Lazette Gifford's photo-essay pieces about fog. What I want to capture is a sense of impending action coupled with a sense of the fey. I know both hunters wear enchanted cloaks that drink up light and render them as vague forms, almost unnoticable to human eyes, but I don't want to come right out and say that. The key with this bit, as with most story beginnings, is to involve the reader without core-dumping a buch of data in their face up front, i.e. Keep the mystery level and tension up so the reader just has to keep reading.
Anyway, that's a project for another day. This morning, I'm writing on Spell Weaver like a good boy (just as soon as I quit messing with this bloody blog).
Darwin
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1 comment:
That's a good boy, Darwin ;) Get on with Spell Weaver so everyone can enjoy it.
Kate (practicing avoidance on my own writing)
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