A little knowledge…
… is a dangerous thing. Maybe this is what Andi and Bria were getting at when they asked if I thought too much craft info stuffed in my head was a bad thing<tm>.
I admit I was pretty bored with the workshop on Saturday as the nuts and bolts were gone over. It’s a good thing the personality of the speaker was engaging and funny. Also, I think Dana Belfry was highly amused by the little origami boxes I made out of Hershey’s Treasures wrappers during the talk.
In a way, I was appalled that the workshop was so nuts and bolts in its approach. Maybe I just assumed the audience for it should already have known the basics of having two of their characters speak to one another on the page? That doesn’t seem like that outlandish of an assumption.
On the other, maybe my expectations were just too high. Did I really expect the speaker to simply download her brain to ours? I don’t know, but I know there was a definite disconnect there. I don’t consider myself to be an expert on dialogue by any means, but the basic mechanics of it have been pretty obvious for a while now.
If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, “Gah! What a snobbish bore!” you can relax, because I’m definitely running into my share of challenges in the Deep Editing class, Bria talked me into taking with her. I’ll be the first to admit that editing is brand spanking new to me. You mean there’s more to it than fiddling with a word choice here and there? Cool.
Anyway, I’m learning technical terms for all sorts of rhetorical devices I knew existed, but never played with on a conscious level. I can hear my DH yawning right about now. Yes, dear. Old hat for you, but I was taking econ and business classes instead.
I think my favorite quote from Saturday’s workshop will always be, “Do it well, but don’t do it often!” That seems to apply to these rhetorical devices. I think the do it well part means you have to make it blend in with the writing around it too. It can’t just stick out like a sore thumb on the page. Otherwise, it just looks a bit purple.
I do feel I am learning from the class (yes I just signed up yesterday), but the EDITS system and taking a highlighter and painting the different sections (dialogue, description, internalization, emotion, and blocking) different colors really lets me see why I like and dislike various sections. Clumps are bad. A nice smattering of everything reads much better.
In other news, I’m over 10k on the Flower Queen’s Daughter story!
Nope, I wasn’t one of those readers who were thinking you were a bore because the seemingly *nuts-n-bolts* workshop. I’m sure I would have been bored by that also, and doing weird things with my chocolate wrappers. I’d make fans or little balls, though–I don’t know origami, alas.
This Deep Editing class you’ve signed up for, where is it? I might want to join it after I get my first craptastic WIP draft done.
😎
Oh, lookie! I have the same blue box design here as I do over at Alice’s site. Nifty!
Really though, i’ve read some stuff that makes me wonder if the writer actually talks… That didn’t sound right. I mean, on a first rough draft of no one that you know. Dialogue must be somewhat tricky, I guess. 😉 Hope the info gets more appealing. I’ll have to try that highlighter thingie, that’d be neat.
You know, I’ve seen a lot of these quilt squares all over the wordpress sites. It’s kind of weird, yet oddly harmonious at the same time. Better’n the anonymous empty box.
I don’t like the highlighter thing. Guess in some ways I’m still a pantser–not plot, per se, but editing. I know “what and how to fix” but I’d be hard pressed to tell you what “it”s called. Like prepostional phrases… (which I know I misspelled) To me–it’s stuff that has a “to” as the second to last word, lol.
Editing is actually easy. If you can read it and not stop and go, “hey??” then it’s good. If you stop, there’s some kind of problem. 🙂
I am a horrible person. Either that or a bit bi-polar in how I support Kaige. . . at least I’m admitting it.
Last week: Kaige! Stop!!!! When is enough, enough? How much craft can you read? (of course she’s my go to girl, font of information, inspiration of all things craft so when she doesn’t stop I win.)
THIS week: Kaige! Hurray! Come join this MONTH LONG INTENSE ONLINE CRAFT CLASS WITH ME!!!!
Keep up the amazing work – You impress me all the time with your ability to actually absorb and apply this stuff we all hear about.
bria
Too much nuts and bolts drives witty dialogue from my head. I’m gonna get back to McKenna. It’s just that Weylyn decided he wanted to ride the pink chair. So I f’d him up a bit and threw in a mate. He’s shocked, but happy, so I feel my work there is done. 😉
Yeah, the quilt squares are some new wordpress thingy. They’re cute.
I know what you mean, Bethanne. I’ve read some of those that somehow managed to get published. *shudder*
As far as pros and cons of highlighters. I’m looking at it as another lens. A tool. It really helped me see why some sections (the non-dialogue ones) were so clunky. They were pretty much solid internalization. Very little thoughts crept in around the blocking and dialogue too. And I need much more description scattered throughout (but I knew this too).
But, doing the highlighter thing helped me SEE it. (I also figured out I could save ink and trees by setting up colored underline styles in MSWord. — either that or it was a creative stab at procrastination 😉 )
As far as knowing the names for all the funky little rhetorical devices… I could care less. Knowing that repeating something 3 times can lend power. That’s cool, and I knew that deep down, but reminders are good. Do I care if it has a different name if it’s the beginning of the sentence, the end, or if you do it in both places and only the middle changes? Not really.
I do think they make it a bit too easy to slide into overwriting something and need to be used with caution, but in the right place they can work.
I understand what you’re saying Jodi, but it’s not that easy for me, especially with my own stuff. Yes, I probably need to let it sit wa while longer to distance myself from it, but even some of the stuff I’ve let sit for 10+ years (yes, I have one of those at the very bottom of the harddrive, hidden away in a secret folder), I just don’t know where to start tweaking on a higher level.
But that’s what this past year (9months?) has been about for me. Learning new skills and techniques and taking what I can use from them. I just need to get jamming on the putting them into practice now. 🙂
Speaking of which… I think I just heard the whip crack.