Alison and I have been having a mutual blog discussion on lyricism, writing, wordsmithing, and storytelling. This reminded me of a post I wrote back in Dec. called The Symphony of Writing.

Click on the link above to read the post and the comments to that post, but the gist of it was:

I forgot to factor in the symphony of writing.

I’m not certain if anyone else hears it or uses it. We all have individual ways with which we approach our writing. My way of writing uses a cadence. Alison once called it “the lyricism” of my voice.

Basically, I hear a rhythm to my writing, some people call it “the flow”. It’s not one instrument, but a symphony, consisting of the sentence, then the paragraph, then the scene, then the chapter, then the story as a whole. All of it must sound beautifully or I’m not satisfied. To me it’s like listening to music where one of the instruments is out of tune. It completely wipes out the beauty of the other instruments.

So here I am correcting newbie author mistakes, too many “he” and “she”, similar words used too close together, etc. etc. Should be easy, right? It’s not. Because changing one word, can sometimes change the rhythm and I’ll have to rewrite the whole sentence, which sometimes causes me to have to rewrite the whole paragraph. In the end, the information is exactly the same, but the presentation is different to continue the lyricism. Chapter One was a pain because I could hear that something was off-key, but I couldn’t pin it down. In the end, it took 4 cps to pinpoint 4 different things and a bit more tweaking on my part to get the start of the music flowing that would carry through the rest of the story.

I think this is what we mean when we say, “Finding someone who “gets” our writing.” I think it’s also why there are some authors whose writing I can’t enjoy. Their writing is just off-key to me. I can’t get into their flow. This is also why I think some editors will turn away writing that’s good, but “not for them”. They just don’t listen to the same music you do.

I always thought this rhythm was related to storytelling. Now I’m wondering if the cadence I hear is related to wordsmithing instead.

Today in California a tiger was shot and killed in the wild. How did it get out in the wild? No one is sure yet. The sad thing is they killed it. I’m all for saving human life first, but I wish they would have exhausted all alternatives.

They

“had to shoot to kill because a tranquilizer would have taken five to 10 minutes to bring down the animal. They were concerned the animal might attack them or bolt onto a nearby highway.”

They could have tried the tranquilizer first and then moved to desperate measures. Two shooters, two rounds. Tranquilizer goes first. Tiger freaks out, take him down. But maybe, just maybe, the poor tired, disoriented tiger might have dropped without a fight and could have been saved.

We’ll never know.

I’m dying here.

Neither my new laptop or desktop came with MS Word. So I ordered it online on the 6th. On the 18th, I set up my desktop thinking Word would arrive on my doorstep any day. By Monday the 21st I was desperate to write, using Works and WordPad just to get the words down. I called the company and they agreed that I should have received my software long ago. They reshipped it yesterday. I hope it comes by the end of this week because I’m going mad. Really.

One scene just refused to wait any longer. It takes place about 1/3 of the way through the story, but I started there. I’ve done this before. Often I don’t end up using the scene the way I wrote it. As a pantser, by the time I get to the point where I could use an already written scene the story has changed enough that it’s no longer feasible. But it does get me thinking and it allows me to discover my characters a bit, lets me get to know them and what their goals are. It’s definitely jumping into an icy river instead of wading in slowly, but hey it’s writing and I love it. Now if only UPS would cooperate and deliver my program!

Jordan said this yesterday:

I’m much more of a storyteller than a writer. I hope the latter catches up with the other soon.

I agree with this. I would say I am a published storyteller who aspires to be a writer. This explains why I can write a story in no time at all, but layering, editing, and wordsmithing take me weeks longer than that. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to be like Alison, who knows the craft well enough to get almost finished product on the page the first time around, but it’s a worthy goal and I aspire to it. I haven’t been writing long and every week that passes I find less errors and I catch myself before I make some of those errors so I think the goal is attainable.

Trade or mass market?

I truly dislike the use of Yahoo Groups in a manner that would best work with a forum message board. Yahoo is great for small groups to commiserate or for large groups as announcement or mailing lists only, but for large communication loops it’s just a horrible medium. You can’t follow threads, topics scroll off the page, the archives are horrible, and you have several unrelated topics coalescing at one time. It’s just a mess. And your options–individual e-mails (prepare for a flood), digest (search for the needle in a haystack), or no mail (spend valuable time surfing to the Yahoo site) are dreadful. I much prefer getting one e-mail that says, “Someone has replied to the [insert title] topic. Click here to read the reply.” How easy is that? Too easy. Which makes me wonder why people continue to use Yahoo. It’s not hip or cool to have a Yahoo loop. Why torture and torment people by using them?

Yesterday Cece said this:

Will I buy another book of hers? Probably, yes, because I think she’s a good storyteller and that’s possibly more important than being a good writer. Anyone can write, writing skills can be honed (and no I’m NOT saying she needs to hone her writing skills LOL) but not everyone can tell stories.

There was a discussion on one of the old PRO listservs about contests and most of the writers felt the unpublished were more brutal scorers than the published. At the time, I disagreed. In my experience with contests, it was usually the unpubbed writers who gave me the highest marks and the published authors who scored me lower. I felt that the unpubbed writers had more of a tendency to get lost in the story while the pubbed authors concentrated on the mechanics of it.

Spam new problem in WP 1.5.