Thursday 9^th July 2020

It’s so easy to have your nose so close to the proverbial grindstone that it’s difficult to see progress.

For example, people tell me I’m a good writer. I think I’m publishable, but beyond that I’m completely blind. There are plenty of shitty writers who are publishable.

There are a few exceptions. There’s a scene in Black As Knight where the POV and even the tense switches mid-sentence that I’m very proud of. It’s not only a technically clever bit of writing (even if I do say so myself) but it really helps elevate the story into something that feels (at the time) it should be the epic climax of the story. It’s one of the few pieces of writing that whenever I come back to it, I feel impressed with myself. Whenever any of my peers comment on that scene I’m secretly beaming inside. Trust me, future Hugo voters, it’s great.

But anything else? No idea. It’s good… but is it passable-good or, you know… good-good?

So I trust those professional people around me, and just focus on the job at hand, confident that if I wrote something truly bad, then they’d let me know.

I’ve been going over this Frankenstein chapter I talked about yesterday. I had stitched two drafts together but still didn’t feel happy with it, so went back over it today.

I found what bothered me was some of the writing. This book has a voice, and with it a certain way to construct sentences. Actually probably several, but I need to make a note to remind myself that.

Because it’s first person, I’m writing in another person’s voice. It can be a bit more verbose than me, so the sentences can be longer. But some of those sentences feel a bit clunky going back over them.

There’s a subtle art going on here, balancing voice and accessibility. A clunky sentence, even if it’s authentic to the character, can throw a reader. So I’m going in and adjusting those sentences – not to turn them into my own voice, but dialing it back a little, so I continue to give the illusion of the verbosity of the character in that situation, but without losing the reader.

And it’s in doing this, I notice my growth as a writer. I’ve had people tell me how much they’ve noticed I’ve improved as a writer between drafts. I’ve never been able to see it personally, and for all I knew I could be getting worse, but people I trust have commented.

And here, in this chapter, I see a little of it.

Doing this second pass on the chapter has left me feeling much better about it, although writing about it now, I do feel I need to be more aware of character voice depending on situation.

But for now I can move onto the next chapter, glad that this difficult Frankenstein one has been completed for now.