A piece of writing advice that I've taken:
I am a really, really wordy writer. One thing I am slowly learning is that the advice to "murder your darlings" is some of the best out there. Case in point: the last fic I posted was originally twice as long. There is another file full of the paragraphs I cut out, and there are about three hundred words in particular that I really liked, but which simply didn't fit with the story it turned into. (I may use them in something else later, though. I really like the dialogue in particular.) Every time I thought something didn't read right, the solution inevitably was to take out words or even entire sentences, and, like magic, everything I wanted to say was on the page, without being obscured by excess verbiage.
Now, if only this worked for papers. There, I find that for every word I cut (and I cut a lot), I add ten more. Sigh.
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A piece of writing advice I need:
POV shifts. My GOD, POV shifts. I do not know why, but I am compelled to bounce through the head of every character in a given scene at some point during that scene unless I write in first-person. It's like, okay, I start out with seeing the action through one person's eyes, and it's all copacetic. But then I find that the next bit of action would be more interesting if seen through this other character's eyes, with the background of their thoughts and reactions, and I jump there, and I think I leave the reader going, "What just happened?" I try to fix it when it comes up--this is often where "murder your darlings" comes in--but sometimes I just leave it, because dammit, I want that private thought or reaction from the other character even if it doesn't flow.
So I don't know. Should I keep ruthlessly trying to write from one POV for the entirety of my (usually quite short) scenes or sections of a piece of prose, only switching at a logical break? Or do people even care about that sort of thing? I feel like I don't notice it as a reader, but maybe other people don't have this compulsion to flip through POVs like a damn gymnast.
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In other news, I am re-reading Eavan Boland's memoir,
Object Lessons. It is slower going than the first time I read it, perhaps because back then I was only writing a short reaction paper to it rather than a thesis on the author's poetry. Nevertheless, it is still interesting, and there are definitely sections that will be useful in my thesis. She has a very complex meditation on place, history, and myth in chapter six that I think will be one of the keys to my analysis of her poetry.
I also like the following passage from chapter seven:
( cut for length )I may just have fandom on the brain, but the first thing I thought of upon reading that was not my thesis, but fanfic, and specifically the gestalts that seem to run through fandom like waves--particular pairings, and particular ways of
writing such pairings. Lyrical angst or snappy sarcasm or a multitude of other styles and tropes seem to go in and out of vogue with some regularity, waxing and waning in various fandoms at different times. I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing (although applying the last sentence of the excerpt to it could certainly make it so), but it is, I think, an interesting one. I haven't drawn any kind of conclusions about it, but it was just something I noticed. (And which other people before me, I am sure, have noticed as well.)
I loaned my director my old copy of the book, with all of its marginalia from when I was twenty-one and reading it for Jesse's class. I didn't really vet it before handing it over, so I hope there's nothing terribly embarrassing. I seem to remember there was a lot of, "I am a woman poet from the American South where Scarlett O'Hara is kind of like our Cathleen Ni Houlihan, and I AGREE WITH THIS STATEMENT" in it. Only perhaps written in incomprehensible shorthand. I know there was a lot of emphatic underlining, anyway...
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