Changes in your Writing Technique

I like writing novel length stories where I can slowly reveal and develop conflicts.  I get a chance to delve right inside my characters and embellish what drives them.  I tend to over-write as I get into my tale.  It then requires tough edits to sharpen disagreements and heighten emotional turmoil, then slow it down so the character has an opportunity to take in the situation.

The writing group I attend have a word of the week and each person is invited to include it in in a piece of flash fiction.  There is no reason to write anything extensive and most people settle for around 100 words. To begin with, my offerings were simply a slice of life and, although anyone in the group recognised it as my work, I have never had a problem with over-writing with these short pieces.


The exercise has served me well.  I am turning out flash fiction worthy of the term now, and look forward to the new challenge each week.  My breakthrough came from the word "cucumber" and I have added it as a taster.

Cucumber

It started simple enough; a bus queue and a forgotten lighter.  I chatted with Silvie all the way into town, so natural and refreshing.  The woes of family life drifted away and I continued with the bus after I got the car back.  It was easy to convince Janet that it saved on the parking.

The cheating grew worse as I took to walking the few streets to Silvie’s house, and running my hands over her soft skin and savouring her flesh.

My father knew how to deal with my lies many years ago.  He took his belt and bruised my back.  One day he chipped a piece of bone from my shoulder blade and I could feel it rubbing under my skin as I cut the lines to his cucumbers. They lay tangled together on the floor for the rest of the season.  With the coming of autumn, my father cut them back until there was nothing left.  Running my fingers over the cold sheet, I’d become accustomed to that feeling.

I suppose people who write short stories and novels have to change their writing style, but I wonder if anyone else agonises over their second draft to the same degree as I do in one specialism, and not in another.

How Close Do You Go

Do you read a book to become immersed in how the characters cope with the situation in a whole new world, or do you want one person's dilemma as your escape route.

We know that by writing in the first person, the reader can get closest to the protagonist.  We are engaged in their ever mounting struggle, and care about the situation they are caught up in.  The individual becomes our friend and their cohorts our family.  But the author treats them as someone else's children who she can't stand.  The reader is kept hanging on, coping with a way of life that is alien, but gradually becoming familiar.



A lot of people write that way, but from the books I'm reading, it seems less popular at the moment.

This may be because it's easier to present a rounded impression of the story by delving into different points of view.  It allows you to develop each character by seeing them from conflicting angles.  We know from our own experience that everyone has good and bad characteristics; which is which, can be a matter of opinion.

A positive as seen from one person can be a negative in the eyes of someone else, especially if there has been friction between them.

The book I'm working on has four points of view.  At the time that I had it professionally critiqued, the reader followed Baz more than anyone else but other characters had their say.  One comment I had to face was that, on reading the manuscript, she didn't see it as Baz's story, because other people got in the way.

In the end, I stayed with several points of view because it is the way I want to write.  But in doing so, I have to accept that the reader will not fall in love with my main character to the same extent as they would have, if I'd written in the first person.