A Fly on the Wall

Highlights from the Richmond Children's Writers September Meeting

Our September meeting was fantastic! Everyone is back from vacation and ready to rock and roll. Here are a few of the more interesting things we discussed:

We all like wacky picture books, but how wacky is too wacky? Can a picture book be too far out? Take this book for example: Dinosaurs Love Underpants. Dinosaurs are a perennial kid favorite, true. And underpants, as discussed in our August meeting, can work for a kids' book. Having said that, Dinosaurs Love Underpants, for me, was just too wacky. But . . . it is a published book, which is nothing to sneeze at. Just goes to show that one person's too-wacky-for-me is another person's book deal. We had some wacky submissions this month, and predictably, those stories drew a variety of reactions from the group.

After reading a chapter from a young adult novel, we discussed this concept:

"The wind howled" is stronger rather than "She heard the wind howling." This is due to fact that in the second sentence, the main character is inserted between the reader and the action. The first sentence makes the reader feel he is the one who is hearing the wind howl. That translates into a more engaging text, which is another way of saying the writing is stronger. Fiction writers would do well to take a good look at sentences phrased with "She saw" or "He felt" or "I heard" or any verb that tells what the main character is perceiving, and rewrite it in a way that allows the reader to experience the sensation as directly as possible.

A submission from a different young adult novel led us into a discussion about novel writing technique. Writing fiction is a complex task, and requires finding the right balance of a lot of moving pieces. Each scene has to move the story forward. It has to do at least one or two other things too, like develop character, set the scene, infuse a mood, build tension, and such. But the primary job of a scene is to move the plot forward. All those other things can be worked in. Each chapter, each scene, has to accomplish several different things at once.

If there were a goddess of multitasking, I imagine she would look something like this.

We will conclude with the September writing prompt:

Write a wacky action scence that weaves in two other elements (choose from character develoment, setting description, mood, or tension). Bonus points for including either dinosaurs or underpants.

Now, write away!

To edit a line.

Warning to non-writers: If you get bored with nuts-and-bolts stuff, this one’s not for you.

My method of writing is not the usual draft-it-all-first approach. I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work for me. If I don’t get it the way I want it, early on, there’s no sense in continuing. Because what comes first influences what follows. I take my idea and start expanding it. While mentally (and sometimes on paper) exploring its potential, I begin to perfect it.

I do this with every line. One line builds from another, until there’s unity within the whole.

Here’s an example of the progression of a sentence in a work in progress, my middle grade* novel, Hans Andersen’s Ghost. The scene: Skim, a boy of twelve, is left standing in the dark on a hilltop far from home. One of the motifs in the story is shoes (he keeps a key in his left shoe).

I'll start with the first version of the sentence. I would include the sentence before it, but this is the beginning of a new paragraph.

» There’s a rumble again; he feels it through the soles of his shoes. (I’m thinking: Hmm … “the soles of his shoes” —echoes of Paul Simon … a distraction, too sing-song for this moment.)


» There’s a rumble again; he feels it through his shoes. (Better, but it does not convey the immediacy of the feeling, because it’s telling us what he feels rather than sending us the feeling.)

» There’s a rumble again, rumbling right through his shoes. (Now we can feel what he feels. But I'll try an even closer description.)

» There’s a rumble again, rumbling up through his shoes. (There. It gives a sense of the vibration and its direction, from the ground up. I considered reinserting “the soles of”—it sounds good, but that added detail might compete with the rumble.)

Now for the next line, to see how it fits.

There’s a rumble again, rumbling up through his shoes. Louder it grows, and stronger, like a mammoth mole tunneling under his feet.

I like the alliteration of the uh sound (rumble, rumbling, up, tunneling, under ... there are actually nine uh sounds in these two lines)—it enhances the uh-oh—something’s-about-to-happen sense I want to convey. But I have a problem with the prosody the word tunneling creates. It has too many syllables that make the sentence drag at the end. So I consider some synonyms and come up with a few possibilities: burrow, grub, and bore. Bore is a little odd and calls attention to itself (besides lacking the uh sound), and burrow/ing is no better than tunneling. So, grub it is. Grubbing—two syllables. And I like the scariness of it.

There’s a rumble again, rumbling up through his shoes. Louder it grows, and stronger, like a mammoth mole grubbing under his feet.

But, being a finicky writer, I think it still drags. So, I do as they say: I’m killing that darling grub.

There’s a rumble again, rumbling up through his shoes. Louder it grows, and stronger, like a mammoth mole under his feet.

I think that says it. It might be even scarier.

—Troy Howell

*middle grade defines fiction specifically suited for readers ages 8-12

Be wise. Revise!

"Revise, revise, revise. Revise until the dang thing stands up and sings!"

This was the advice that award-winning author Graham Salisbury had for young writers. Mr. Salisbury was the visiting author for the Junior League of Richmond's Junior Book and Author event this year. He captivated his audience, young and old alike, with tales of growing up in Hawaii, narrowly escaping vicious eels, maintaining a cool reputation amid shark attacks, and being swept out to sea during a boy scout campout at the beach. But when it came to writing, he was all about revision. "That's when the fun starts," he said. "If you want to be a writer, you want revision. You need revision. You love revision."

His words made me think about how I have come to enjoy the revision process. When I began to see the benefits that diligent it yields, I became a big fan of revision. Here are some of the things revision gives you:

- A better sense of what story you are trying to tell.
- A clearer understanding of your characters.
- Stronger dramatic moments and funnier humorous moments.
- A richer setting.
- Themes that are more fully developed and resonant.
- Consistency in all aspects of the story.

Well, the list is much longer, but that's a start. What else does revision buy you?