Creative versus critical voice

I’ve been reading Dean Wesley Smith’s article entitled: Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing (http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=4477) and it’s making me think about creative versus critical voice. What Dean says is that we should always write in creative voice even when editing.  Furthermore, he doesn’t believe in the editing we all think we have to do—draft after draft after draft all in the name of improvement.  I’m puzzling over this because of how many drafts I’ve done on my trilogy and what I’ve accomplished—for one thing I know that I did not stay in creative voice.

My husband says the first draft of The Moonstone was the best. It meandered all over, with lots of description with no hook at the beginning. I changed it because I wanted to have an agent pick it up—and so I had a hook in the first line. It didn’t go over the requisite 65,000 words. The first pages moved rapidly into the plot line. Did an agent pick it up? No. But by then I was on my way to cutting and slashing, taking out descriptive passages that “didn’t further the narrative” and making sure that the plot moved forward at all costs. But sometimes this may not be such a good idea--I have one reader who wanted to know what I'd cut out of the book. For her the meandering parts are the best. 

Dean writes his first draft, corrects for mistakes and typos and so on and then hands it to his reader—of course he’s a professional, having written numerous books. We can’t all do that, especially as debut authors, can we? And what about staying in creative voice? I’m not sure I understand how to do so since my internal editor is  strong and opinionated. Clues need to be noticed when we’ve left creative voice, I suppose—I ran some changes by my husband recently—I took out articles, ‘the’ specifically, since I had two of them in a sentence. When I read the sentence with and without ‘the’, the one with flowed better. Maybe that’s a way to decipher the code for creative or critical—reading aloud…

One thing I can say is, if I feel energy behind what I’m writing then I should keep going. If not, wait until the muse is there again, whispering in my ear.

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What do you think about creative versus critical voice? Do you know when you’re in one or the other? How many drafts do you do?

(this is a reprint of an old one, but thought it important enough to post again)

Thanks for reading!

To visit my blog:

www.nikkibroadwellauthor.com

Hooks and other things to consider

I'm not even sure where I read this, but the advice was to keep the reader turning pages by ending every chapter with a hook--what will happen next?

This can be done several ways--by someone running for their lives or by simply ending the chapter with a question. Will she make it to the town in time to stop the insurrection? We don't know and so we turn the page.

I find myself doing this automatically now, and many times I'll come up with a sentence that seems like the end of a chapter when in reality the chapter is too short and needs to go on.

How about the hook at the beginning? The adage of 'start your story with a major hook and then keep the suspense building' is a good one. But at some point we need to hear the backstory, or the narrative has no depth. Who is this woman who's running from the law? Why does she keep doing stupid things?  What in her background would account for this? Don't do an info dump, just weave it in when you need to slow down the action.

One of the things I've discovered is that when the narrative moves too quickly, it's as though we don't have time to take a breath. As a writer, breathe in and relax a moment, bringing the reader into the present, and then get in touch with what the main character is feeling. Take a short hiatus and then you can heighten the tension again. It's like mixing staccato sentences in with longer ones--they all have their place but if you overdo one or the other it makes for a less engaging story. It's like a symphony in which the music changes from fast-paced, to slow and steady.

But first and foremost be interested in what you're writing. Be there in the scene, visualize the booming cannon as it kicks backward, emitting a plume of smoke, hear what it does to your eardrums, see the sparks and the smoke from the explosion, smell the cordite. This is where you hook your reader because you've brought them directly into the action.

The more engaged you are the better it will be.

Thanks for reading and comments are most appreciated!