1,134 words written so far this week. So I’ve got some catchup work to do this weekend.
About half of those words are from revising the flash fiction story I wrote at WonderCon. I tried to do it right this time: I put it aside for a week, sent it out to some very kind friends who were willing to read it, and then started working on it after I’d had a few days to digest their feedback.
I feel like this second draft is orders of magnitude better than the first. Though even calling it a second draft is somewhat disingenuous; I’ve written three other drafts of the same idea (different characters) before, neither of which really worked. So in some ways I’ve been working on this story for just two weeks. In other ways, I’ve been working on it for (checks date on Scrivener) almost a year.
Ye gods.
Found another gem on Twitter this week, from writer A Lee Martinez, that I’d like to share. It pushed me to re-examine my own dialog tags, and tighten things up a bit in that short story I’m working on.
The whole thread is good, but this is the bit that resonated with me:
It's like this:
"I don't know." He turned to her. "I don't."
VS.
He turned to her. "I don't know."
Even something as minor as that can turn a sentence, turning a scene, turning a chapter, turning a whole book. It's not that every word matters, but the ones that do, really doI realized I tend to do the former a lot, particularly when I'm trying to mimic the cadence of real speech. But his tweet made me realize my writing would be stronger if I stopped using dialog tags and other interruptions as crutches, and just let the dialog speak for itself. True, that might mean changing the dialog. But the writing will be better for it.
What about you? What piece of writing advice has made you change something, however minor, in your own writing?
