Rewriting for Style - Scene and Stucture

I know it's been a while. I wish I could say that I've been consumed with writing fiction, but that would be a stretch. Business writing for my day job - yes. Fiction, uh, not so much.

I've finished another rewrite of Caviar for an agent - trying to focus my style and am working on some other revisions for an editor request. So the writing is moving forward. But the style rewrite to get more of my voice in the story was very challenging.

Part of it is really getting into the character's POV and channeling the emotion onto the page. Of course the difficult part is that it's not my emotions, but the character's feelings and reactions to the story situation. Staying true to the character is hard sometimes. Probably because, in a revision, I know where she's going and I start pushing her there.

What I've learned from this is that I can't push. I need to let her lead me. And that's hard to do. I have to really let myself trust that she knows where she's taking me. But, of course, I falter. And push her. And then it doesn't work and the writing is choppy where it should be fluid.

Thankfully, I think I finally got it. Not that I'm convinced I'll have it consistently, but I think I'm learning and I feel good about that.

On another note, I had an idea for a new story. A women's fiction story about women who are single and live full time in RVs. The working title is Kangaroo Caravan, because Kangaroo can mean Boomer and these women are older. I haven't decided much more than that, but I do know that one of them has a Havanese named Roo. Independence is feeling like a major theme. It's shaping up nicely in my head, so we'll see.

Currently, I'm reading John Bickham's Scene and Structure to see what else I can learn. It's interesting in theory, but I'm not sure I agree with him about Sequel.

Atlanta is next month and I'm looking forward to seeing old friends and submerging myself in a week all about writing.

Thanks for stopping by,

Ardath

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