The smell of incense is thick and heady, mingling with the hours-old scent of burnt toast. Outside, it’s quiet except for the shrill yap of a dog or the rogue shriek of a child’s laugh. Inside, it’s cold – numb fingers tapping away at smooth, overused keys. The aftertaste of coffee lingers in my mouth, simultaneously bitter and sweet.
What did you notice about this paragraph?
I bumped into writer friend at the library and immediately saw something was wrong with him. He looked ghostly white and on the verge of tears, though he was usually quite stoic.
“What happened?” I asked.
He shook his head, looked away, then whispered, “I just asked her—tell me what you think.”
That’s when I noticed the pages clutched in his hands. His manuscript. It was just a few pages, but they were clearly bleeding red.
After coaxing the story from him, I learned he’d given the first chapter of his first-ever novel to an experienced writer with no instructions. She gave him back a line-by-line edit, listing everything wrong with his story.
He quit writing, which is a shame because he has talent. Although the experienced writer should have had more mercy on this newbie, he should’ve been clearer in his critique needs to avoid miscommunication.
Don’t make the same mistake.
Many of the earliest forms of written literature that exist are religious texts, and most of us at some point in our schooling will study at least one type of ancient mythology, be it Greco-Roman, Egyptian, or Norse. I happened to be fascinated with all three at the age of ten. More than once in these stories do you run into a human mortal being raised to the status of a god. There is a name for this phenomenon, and it’s called apotheosis.
A synopsis is a summary of your manuscript. That’s it. You get a chance to answer the question “what’s your novel about?” in one single-spaced page in an omniscient narrative voice.
Why are some writers five, ten, or twenty times more productive than everyone else? Like superhumans, they somehow juggle the chainsaws of everyday life, yet still manage to consistently finish book after book while others struggle.
I have been a contributor here at The Write Practice for over a year. In that time, I’ve had the honor and the pleasure to get to know some of you. I’ve enjoyed writing every one of the posts published in my TWP stream and taking part in discussions and comments. But as all things eventually do, this too must come to an end. This is my last regular post.
The good news is, it’s not one of those “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” endings. It’s more like “I still love you but I have to go and I’ll write when I can.” Blame it on our solar system that only gives us twenty-four hours in a day. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the Earth spin a little slower, but not even Elon Musk has been able to do that. So I’m taking an impermament bow.
