The pants have it

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The kind people who stop my blog for my Weekend Writing Warriors posts often say that my excerpts feel real, authentic. I think I've figured out why, and it has to do with pantsing vs plotting.

My draft 1 was "pantsed" 100%. A tiny bit of scene occurred to me, sounded great, wanted to see what would happen, so I wrote it out. That's basically how the whole draft got written. Some scenes are based on the one written immediately prior, and some (most of the early ones, speaking of when they fall in the storyline) are only loosely connected to other scenes. I didn't even know what "plotting" meant back then.

So when I sat down to make a coherent STORY out of all that in draft 2 (by figuring out connections between all the scenes and plotting the story), I had serious work waiting for me. Recently, I struggled with a passage in which I kept deleting and rewriting dialog because I kept missing the point of the scene. I deleted and rewrote and deleted so much that I finally asked myself what the heck the real problem was.

The characters told me I needed to stop trying to put words in their mouths, and just let them do the talking! ;-)

I'd usually copy scenes from draft 1 into draft 2 and rewrite, delete, add, tweak until it all fit the emerging storyline. I realized I'd been saying "I like that dialog, it's succinct, it's emotional, it really fits the character, I'm keeping it" pretty often. By trying to change it to fit a more plotted draft 2, I was effectively trying to force a round peg into an oval hole. It almost fit, but if I was honest with myself, it was forcing.

What keeps attracting me in draft 1 is the raw emotion in the dialog. It needs some shining up before letting other people read it, but it's exactly that spontaneity that makes it feel so real. That came from pantsing.

Now I'm not implying that plotting out a story will ruin the feel and flavor. Not at all. I've sworn on everything holy I can think of that the next thing I write will have at least a rough outline before I sit down to do any actual scenes. For me, a 100% pansted thing is not a coherent story. Readers like coherent books, you see :-D

However, for dialog that immediately grips readers, I have to let my characters just talk. When it springs right out of their souls, readers will connect with it.

If you're having a hard time with dialog that isn't getting the reaction you want from readers, take the gags off your peeps. Let 'em say anything they want, no holds barred. You can clean it up later. I learned some great Spanish swearing that way!

I don't have a ruler but ... Pt II

Continuing from here but this post will be shorter, promise.

Recently I paid attention to how I use commas because it seems to me that many people overuse them. And I noticed that in early drafts of chapters and blog posts, I do it too!

And I realized that typing while I think is the culprit. I go along banging words out as they occur to me and when my thought process gets stuck, I stop typing--but first, I add a comma. It's like I have to capture every nuance of thought, even the pauses. For a first draft, that's absolutely fine. Now we're back to proofreading: okay, you've gotten a bunch of ideas down kind of as they formed. Great, you've got coherent thoughts and you want to tell people! Go for it.

Just proofread before you press “publish” or “send”, okay? It doesn't take long and it's not as annoying as flossing. Here's a tip from a copy editor I briefly worked with: Start with the last sentence, read that out loud, then move on to the second-last sentence, and keep going backwards. It's best to have another person follow along on their own copy because they catch things you might miss, but even doing it alone helps.

You can even do it between paragraphs. Whenever you temporarily run out of ideas, read over what you have so far. Once you get in the habit of proofreading it becomes automatic. Your first drafts and off-the-cuff posts will have fewer mistakes. More people will smile at you.

Too many commas can slow readers down. That’s exactly what you don’t want in scenes with fast-paced action or somebody’s hyped-up, tumbling thoughts. Even in blog posts, too many commas make me feel like I’m riding a cantering horse: bouncing up and down.

Commas. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, some are necessary and some are like those spiked strips cops throw across the roadway to catch speeding crooks. I don’t normally pontificate like this but some things just get in my craw and I have to snap about it.

Rant over, really. Feel free to disagree with me, it’s fine. Won’t be the last time, no doubt :D

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I don't have a ruler to slap your hand with, but ...

Sometimes, the world changes in unnecessary ways. You ever notice that? Soon as I decide I like a new product at the grocery store, dammit it's gone. A neighbor plows the snow out of his driveway and into the parking space in front of your house. So as I read blog posts and story drafts, when I see an unnecessary trend in how people use English, it pesters me.

Most word processing programs have spell checkers included. I usually use Blogger in Firefox, and that infamous red squiggly line appears underneath "alot" because it's incorrect. Do people turn off their spell checkers? Do they just not notice the red squiggle? Do they just not care? I don't know.

I'm not talking about occasional typos. When somebody repeatedly uses the wrong form of a word, it's almost certainly not a typo.

For example:

• "alot" instead of "a lot"
• "flush out" instead of "flesh out" (unless you really don't like the thing you're talking about. "Flush out" has a completely different meaning)
• "peak interest" or "peek interest" instead of "pique interest" 

Most U.S. editors and agents are not going to look favorably on a query that uses "alot" or "peak interest." I bought a self-pubbed story but had to put it down about 1/3 of the way in. When I popped on to Amazon to leave a review, I saw lots of comments about how badly edited the book was. So readers do notice this stuff.

There are rules for using English. Some of them can bend and some of them are meant to provide standardization so we all know what the heck we're talking about. 

Mistakes in blog posts are pet peeve of mine. When you deal with a publisher, you might find mistakes in the finished book that you had nothing to do with. Blogs are totally in our control. Proofread, that's all I'm saying. If there's time to put together a post, there's five more minutes to proofread it. Sometimes you miss stuff. I get that. My regular critters find mistakes in my chapters that I missed. But typos, left out words, and misuse of homophones don't happen often in my writing because I proofread.

Proofreading is not some mystic or arcane power. Anybody can do it. You don't have to be OCD to fix mistakes.

I have one more thing to say but I’ll keep that for next time. Thanks for reading! It's a grey day in my part of the Northeastern U.S. so maybe that's affected my mood.  Happy 2013 everybody!
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