The Weight of What's Right

I thought I was a smart guy. I had a great verbal. In college, I breezed through creative writing and literature courses. Over the years I continued to write, in professional and academic arenas, and was successful in both. Then I started my quest to publish a novel, and experienced writers and even some professionals have pointed out I had more good fortune in my first year than should be allowed an aspiring author.

So why does it feel as though I've learned nothing.

Case in point, I entered a YA contest over at Kidlit. The premise was simple, agent Mary Kole sifted through a few hundred openings, and picked her favorites. Mine was nowhere near the top five, and after reading through her winners, probably nowhere near the top fifty. The winner's opening, especially the top three, had voice that took on a life of its own. Compared to theirs, mine is weak, lifeless, and way too drawn out.

Fortunately, I've scheduled a rewrite.

One of my writing partners (here) unintentionally helped me realize I had a lot to learn about writing. It started with a lecture over passive verbs; she looked at my critique of another member and politely pointed out what I thought was passive tense, was actually past perfect. Like any good professional, I immediately went to school. As coincidence would have it, one of my favorite writer's blogs, Cec Murphy's Writer to Writer, recently addressed appropriate uses of passive voice.

Having spent an adult lifetime trying to crush the evils of passive voice, now I'm thinking I should reconsider. However, the hard part is when to pick and choose those special moments to actually use a specific style technique to achieve a desired effect. In reading Cec's opines of proper passive voice, I picked up his thoughts regarding use of progressive tense. What the heck is that? Now, I know.

Up to now I've simply been putting words on paper without giving much thought to using the actual structure of the sentence as a literary weapon. The second and third order effects have me reconsidering my use of an outline as more than just a story-planning device. As an old boss told me, words matter because they have meaning. How they are used is probably a close second.

Several months ago, my father, an avid reader, quoted me some unknown dead writer who was asked by an interviewer when he learned to write. The writer replied something to the tune of, 'It took a quarter million words for me to start learning.' I'm horribly paraphrasing, and Lord knows, I wasn't listening all that well (sorry, Dad), but only now I can begin to understand the point of his discussion.

Knowledge is heavy, and the more of it I pick up, the more there's an obligation to use it. You can put as much, or as little, as you want into your projects. You can throw a hundred thousand words into a program and call it a manuscript. You can even call your friends and tell them you wrote a book. The way I see it, cranking out the first 'book' was easy, and to date, I haven't really written anything.

But I'm working on it.