Shouts From Down Under

Are you writing bipolar stories of tidal proportion? Swell!

Everyone has them. Moods. Crappy. Happy. Snappy. Hypochondriac-y

Relaxed even.



When you leave off your work after a chapter completion and return to writing a few days, a week, a month, a couple of years later, then the consistency of your piece, overall, may suffer what my late cousin used to call "the dry dribbly's" She used to define a lot of unhappy moments as causing "the dry dribbly's" so I never nailed down completely a clear understanding.

But it's not best practice. Isn't that a safe statement? No one could argue passionately against THAT. NO WAY!

Do you ever read your finished story / novel a couple months later, after leaving it completely alone, and realise that there is a marked shift in the tone? Even from one chapter to another, you can feel the difference with high tide mark clarity. You can see the ring in the bathtub. You can observe the clean handed children and the line that defines their filthy forearms.

You can trip over the slump of quality, the schism of change, the seismic shift, the watershed.

Deliberate! you say. I MEANT to do that. It was part of the plot all along. Yes, you protest indignantly, and display your pristine purpose with upturned, widely spaced (defensive) hand gesture of innocence.

However, sadly, any reader, and yourself later on in private, will read it and know the ugly protruding public and shameful truth. Your mood changed. As a writer, you suddenly became visible to the reader. They saw through what should have been a comfortable and warm world of predictable and reassuring characters, setting, scenes, descriptions and all the rest. This veil that we like to be sure is waterproof has sprung a large leak. And the leak is you.

This is not good. This is not right. This is not green eggs and ham, Uncle Tran I am.

Readers are supposed to basically drown in your world, lose their sense of time, identity, everything. They should (mostly voluntarily) be enthralled, enchanted, engaged, enveloped, entertained, entranced, empathetic, enabled compellingly into your contagion.

Your story should infect them. It should be page turner fatal. Their free choice of continuing ideally should be taken away. Not just infected but addicted until the final ending moments of your narrative, until those thrusting descriptors and dialogue do damage to any small convulsion of self will left in their mind or body.

(Convulsion: http://thesaurus.com/browse/shake )

Does this not make sense? Are you not convinced the whole circumference of the pie chart? Do you not comprehend this fact?

You do not want your reader distracted by your own personal moods infiltrating your work unintentionally.

So stop making excuses pickle head. Get the heck good with your genre. Smarten up your drive, motivation, and enthusiasm ankleface.

Otherwise you'll end up as cranky as me by the end of your efforts at eluding alliteration.

*Everyone! Do it RIGHT!!! (&*&#%$^#$%^!!!!)


http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1433212

Sparky




*Did anyone notice my mood change in this blog entry?