“It ain’t over till it’s over”

When is it over?

That famous philosopher, Yogi Berra said “It ain’t over till it’s over” among other things he said that will go down in history.  Which brings up a point for us as writers.  When is it over?  When have you written enough?  When have you edited enough?  When have you had friends, family and the random person from your writing group give it enough reads?  Is it ready to be sent out with your name on it?  Is it as good as you can make it?

First things first.  It’ll never be right.  You can do all the things mentioned above till the cows come home and chances are you can still find ways to improve it.  The problem is you probably can’t find those ways yourself.  I’ve talked about editing in the past which included paying for an editor or trying to do it yourself.

I recently had a novel published and so far, I have had two people contact me and tell me of mistakes that are still in it.  How do I feel about that?  Embarrassed of course but I don’t know what I could have done to prevent it.  I went through the manuscript several times myself.  I have a program I use that points out redundancy in words, profanity, the wrong tense etc. and I always use it prior to sending a manuscript to my editor.  I think she does a great job of finding things I overlook but evidently this time we both failed.

I keep a novel by one of my favorite authors who now writes four books a year.  He is one of the most prolific writers out there today.  In one of the books he has a character who said he was a Soldier in the Army.  A few pages later he tells someone he went to “boot camp” and in the next chapter he talks about being in the Marines.  There are several disconnects there.  Soldiers are in the Army but they go to Basic Training.  Marines and Navy recruits go to Boot Camp.  Unless you are familiar with the military service it probably would not register as a series of mistakes but to an Army retiree like me, it was a red flag. Will I stop reading his novels because of this?  No way.  He’s still a very good story teller.  Will I look for mistakes in the future a little harder than I have in the past?  Probably.

Who didn’t catch the mistakes before the book was finished?  Him, his editor, his friend? Who knows. Point is we all make mistakes and nothing, or almost nothing in life is perfect and that goes for your writing and mine.  We can only do the best we can and let it go.  The consolation for us is that in most cases the person reading and finding the mistakes bought the book or magazine and we either have been or will get paid for the writing.

We can only do the very best we can, have somebody we trust take a look at the work and like a mama bird with a newly hatched birdie, kick it out of the nest and see if it can fly.

Yogi also said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  Gotta love ol’ Yogi.

Saving The Trauma For Your Drama

THE DRAMA OF TRAUMA

Can you write about the trauma in your life?  Are you too close to it to be able to step back and see it for what it really is?  Most of us are to a certain extent, but we tend to use some of it in our writing whether we realize it or not.

Think about a tragedy that you experienced.  It could be the death of a family member or close friend, even a beloved pet.  What about that auto accident you had or almost had that you still think about when you get in a similar situation?  If your character needs to be in an auto accident, you recall what you felt and give it to the character.  That’s using the drama of the trauma.

Look at it from the other side.  How do you treat the trauma you caused for someone else?  What?  Of course, we’ve all cause some trauma in other people’s lives whether we know it or accept it or not.  Remember those classic lines your mother or father said? “This is going to hurt me more than it is you.”  In reality it probably did, but not at the time.  Have you repeated them to someone else, probably your children?’

How many writers are now, or were police officers, fire fighters, first responders or military?  For many of them, and I include myself in that group, writing about the trauma we’ve seen is something that we can’t avoid.  How can a police officer who has seen many fatal auto accidents, domestic violence situations or other horrible things that people do to each other just push those memories aside and not write about them?

I know a former helicopter pilot who flew in Viet Nam who upon retiring from the Army had a second career as a writer.  He wrote romance novels under an assumed name, of course.  I read a couple of them and in each one I could tell when he was reaching back and bringing up something that had happened when he was on active duty.  It was not blood and guts, but it was reality and it fit the scenario of his romance novels.

In reality, trauma, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  How many times has someone sent you a link to a five-minute compilation of people doing really stupid things and paying the price for it?  Admit it, you laughed at their situation.  It was funny to you and to me, because it was not us who fell off the roof, or slid down the river bank when the rope broke or did a double back flip when the bicycle trip went south on us.  It’s much easier to write about their trauma than ours.

I did a workshop at a writer’s conference once on this subject and I asked the participants if someone would like to tell of a particular tragedy that they experienced.  I was completely unprepared for two of the response I got.  One lady said her husband’s picture was featured one night on America’s Most Wanted.  They had been married for several years and lived a normal life. He left the next day and has never been seen since.  Another person informed the assembled group that his grandfather had killed his grandmother as an act of love.  Both were in their 80’s and she was in very bad health and he did not want to see her suffer any longer. 

Both these people said they planned to use the situations in their writing.

"Here, hold my beer and watch this.”

Got Something to Say?  Speak Up!

Do your characters speak or actually say something?  Think about it.  There’s a great difference between taking and saying something.  When Abe Lincoln was moving through the crowd at Gettysburg, he probably talked to the men and women there.  “Excuse me.”  “Thank you for moving aside.”  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to step on your foot.”  That was him talking.  A few minutes later, he SAID something.  We know it as the Gettysburg Address.

When it’s time for your characters to open their mouths, put words in them that say something.  In my screenwriting class on dialog, I ask what the participants think is the worst thing one person can say to another.  It’s a loaded question since I’m the instructor because I’ve already decided what it is.  A friend of mine and I were enjoying some adult beverages one night and I asked him that question.  We came up with two finalists.  You’re on the operating table, tubes, lines, bottles etc. hooked up to you.  Just as the Anesthesiologist puts the mask on your face and you take that last deep breath, you hear your surgeon say, “Oh,)$&&#, I hate it when I do that.”  Or…the winner.  You walk into your house and your significant other is sitting waiting for you.  From the look on his/her face you know you’re in deep kimchi.  He/she looks at you and with a look that would melt cold steel, says, “I know what you’ve been doing and I know who you’ve been doing it with.”

I ask for a volunteer and set up the scene.  I wait for her to get ready and then I say, “Hi, honey.  I’m home.”  I’m met with “I know what you’ve…etc.” and off we go.  It’s all spontaneous since I have no idea how she will play it or what she will say, but believe me, I’m never disappointed with what comes out of her mouth.  And neither is the class.

With the exception of the first two, there are very few complete sentences.  We cut each other off.  We step on the other person’s words.  We raise our voices. We swear.  We stutter and stammer and take long pauses between words.  We gather thoughts.  We talk like real people talk and not like they write.

Make your character’s dialog fit the scenario.  Imagine being in the boat that George Washington used to cross the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War.  You’ve seen the picture, I’m sure.  Put your character in the boat.  What did the man behind George say other than, “Damn, it’s cold.”  Did he say something about this being their last real chance to win the war?  Did he ask the man behind him to tell his wife and children he loved them if he did not make it home?

Think about the situation you’ve put your character in and let them run with it.  How long did it take Neil Armstrong to come up with “A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind” when he stepped on the moon?  That was not spontaneous.  He thought about it and fit the words to the situation.  He wasn’t a writer. He was an astronaut, but he said something.

And third place was….” Here, hold my beer and watch this.”