the book

I feel like I should perhaps be keeping notes on my progress with the novel, when I've finished a chapter, when I've submitted to my critiquing group, what their responses are, what my further thoughts are. But that's all so tedious.

I have a few corrections to make per S on chapter eight. I always give him the latest version of a chapter before I present it to the Group. I also have the wonderful ears of P who says she enjoys hearing me read the chapters out loud to her. I know she enjoys it, and it is such a great big help to me to hear myself read what I've written.

That's my biggest goal as a writer, I think, to make the written word sound like a story that is being told. I also picture the events so clearly that I think my writing leans toward being a movie-style description of things.

I noticed this about my writing after a good friend and after a couple of people in the Group said I use a lot of color descriptions. The good friend said this wasn't necessarily a problem; the people in the Group said I might want to consider using some of the other senses in my descriptions (one person said I might want to be a bit more "judicious" with my use of colors in descriptions "because colors evoke very specific memories in peoples' minds." {We certainly don't want that, do we?}) I know I use a lot of colors, but I think I "use the other senses" as well. But like for instance if I write about a smell -- a bad smell perhaps -- the writing of it seems to be more in the reaction of the people experiencing it than an actual chemical description of the smell.

A lot of what the Group comments on annoys me (and when I tell S their comments, they annoy him even more), but I still think it's very good for me, this Group, having a Group, going to a Group regularly because the deadlines give me goals to hit, and having my work critiqued by people who have little interest in it (other than the fact that they have to do so in order to get my critical opinion of their work) is humbling.

Even when people point out seemingly totally ridiculous things, I am forced to look at them, at least for a moment; sometimes that leads me to tweak those things, or sometimes I just feel even more confident in what I've written. S says it seems like these people have no patience. The novel doesn't move in a linear way in the least. Most of the chapters relate to each other pretty obviously in my mind, but then there's chapter five, "didn't stop," which takes place fourteen years before the previous chapter, and which introduces characters that haven't even been hinted about as yet. Crazy!

When I read chapter eight to S, he said, "Your Group is going to let out a huge collective sigh of relief!" It's true, a lot of the frayed edges are associated in chapter eight (though more frays are introduced...). It's thrilling for me to see it come together, and I think it was thrilling for S and P as well to see them come together.

The Group also does point out things that I (and S and P) have missed which I think really do need to be looked at. Many in the Group are very good about technical things, being able to spot inaccuracies (or potential inaccuracies) in plot, character, setting, etc. So it's worth it to me to bear through some of the more ridiculous comments to get to those nuggets that really could make the story stronger.

Okay, so one of the most ridiculous (recent) comments was with regard to a description in chapter seven:

His full lips were accentuated by the lamplight, his top lip the silhouette of a bird in flight.

One person in my Group circled the end of that sentence and wrote next to it "I'm not picturing this metaphor," then further added aloud in the Group meeting, "I can imagine a lot of different bird silhouettes; I can picture a hummingbird, I can picture a condor, but I'm not sure what kind of bird you're referring to."

Those kinds of comments just give me a little inner smile but no panicky feeling that I haven't done my job as a writer... (And I'm not trying to make fun of this person, not too much; I have a really hard time critiquing other peoples' work as well. It's not easy. But that was pretty funny.)