audacityinblack: incandescent-creativity: christinawritesfiction: I want my writing to be...

[dragonlady7]

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audacityinblack https://audacityinblack.tumblr.com/post/182662024859/incandescent-creativity :

incandescent-creativity https://incandescent-creativity.tumblr.com/post/182510249226/christinawritesfiction-i-want-my-writing-to-be :

christinawritesfiction https://christinawritesfiction.tumblr.com/post/182510151820/i-want-my-writing-to-be-smart-heres-what-i-mean :

I want my writing to be smart.

Here’s what I mean: I want to write something you can understand on the first go, no problem. But then, the more you think about it, the more little things you realize. Are those little things essential to grasping the plot? No, but they enhance it. Most importantly, you feel smart for pointing them out, and I feel smart for writing them.

This is a very specific mood but I’ll be damned if I don’t also want this

I want people to read my work again and again, and each time they spot something and go “HOW DID I MISS THAT?!”

I feel this but I want to point out that the way to do this isn’t in language, it’s not in clever phrasing. It’s in thoroughly understanding the emotional reality of your characters. I can’t read “clever” stories anymore– I don’t have the concentration, I lose sight of the details. I cannot parse precious language easily, I lose track of convoluted reasoning.

But if your story is built on a rock-solid understanding of your characters, you will find things on a reread as the AUTHOR that you had not realized were there. He betrays her in chapter 5, and in chapter 3 you see that his speech is oddly stilted, he’s clearly hiding something, though it hadn’t seemed that way at the time. Your characters will put things like that there FOR you, and they will seem right as you write them, and it will be true, and sometimes you only discover them on the edit, but they’re there, already, for you– if you have your characters so nailed-down that they are correct and are themselves. That’s the key. It has to be honest, it cannot be you trying to trick your readers or your character.

So there’s my two cents, as a writer who writes things people find a lot of meaning in but that stay easy to follow. (Some of my best feedback was a reader saying they’d acquired a cognitive impairment that made reading fiction dicey but they could follow my stories, and as somebody with pretty bad untreated ADHD that sometimes means books are out of my reach, I felt that!!! I felt that.)