Good Writing

Recognizing that many aspects of my writing were substandard was not an easy pill to swallow. It wasn't so much the comments received from submitted pages, they were generally so contradictory from agent to agent as to be laughable, but a gradual dawning. One agent did point out the extreme overuse of exclamation points, a sign of a very green writer. No, I think it must have been the constant revisiting of the first three manuscripts in the series that did it. Life was pretty dismal at that point, and I spent as much time as possible on Aketti to compensate. Coming back to an MS after a period away can be sobering. The euphoria of composition is diminished and a certain objectivity returns.

As noted in yesterday's post I never doubted the quality of the story, I knew it was superb, but how I presented that story did cause some cringing. It was about this time that I sent out a number of letters to mainstream science fiction authors in the hope of gaining some insight and possibly a blurb or two. I received two replies that were quite helpful. One was from Greg Bear who was tied up in his own project but still took time to say he thought the MS had promise. The second and most helpful letter came from David Brin. He made some very helpful suggestions about paragraph length and being careful not to have two characters speaking in the same paragraph. We exchanged several letters and that started a massive rewrite binge. I can tell you it wasn't only the helpful hints, but just the fact that an author that I admired took the time to correspond.

Here are a few items I picked up and refined over time:

• One voice per paragraph.
  
• Keep paragraphs short - long paragraphs can overwhelm a reader. It is especially important to control paragraph length during action scenes: short paragraphs and short sentences. Narrative is a different animal. At times you may need to lengthen both sentences and paragraphs, but only by considered intent not poetic happenstance.
  
• Do NOT overuse exclamation points. Express intensity by the context of your writing. Recall that I mentioned the importance of what you write outside quotation marks. That's context. I suspect that one could write a book without a single quotation mark, but one now and then is fine.
• Do NOT give your characters extensive powers right off and then spend the rest of the story having to defeat them. You know, if someone has such power he just waves his hand and it's all over in the first chapter. Series like that just flat turn me off. Build slowly. Reveal your characters over time. Keep the reader in suspense. This is one bullet I dodged from the start.

The list is long, but the ones above are a few of the most important. So there I was on my back at 30,000 feet with Zero's coming out of the sun...no, no, there I was madly editing three manuscripts in series. While making changes, I couldn't help but recall some of the comments and suggestions I received from agents and similar ilk early on. I mentioned they were contradictory, but at first I didn't realize that.