Ok, so these are some of the general learnings I took away from all of our sessions with this week. Though this doesn’t include the handouts, these are the observations I made during the crit sessions which resulted from some of the general discussions. I wrote these in my notebook as things I would try to reference in my own writing:

  • Rhythm in Sentences: if the rhythms of all the sentences are all the same, the reader will start to feel flat, even when they don’t realise it. Read your sentences out loud and see if they sound too much like a ’shopping list’.
  • Titles: Titles that directly refer to the story in an obvious way are always suspect. Try to build titles for your story that relate to the theme which it explores, but that work when connected with the content. Don’t make them too obvious or too removed from the story. Some authors have had stories that were not published for years and then, when they changed the title, they sold instantly.
  • Phrasing: phrasing like “Perilously beautiful” sound awkward. You can hear the writing become suddenly self-conscious. Watch out for these things and axe them on sight.
  • Commas: if they help the meaning of the sentence and/or there is supposed to be a pause where the comma exists, use them. Otherwise, in most cases you can take them out.
  • Dialogue: The basic rule of dialogue is that it must never do one thing. If it does, chances are it will be lifeless.
  • Public Lending Rights (PLR): to make up from the loss of income from libraries lending books, the Labour Government introduced a PLR scheme. Each year a random count of books is conducted in libraries. Authors are then paid from a pool of funds according to the number of their books that are held in Australian libraries. This also includes ‘Educational Libraries’ (I gather this is schools, unis, etc). The amount for well-known authors can often be larger than the royalties received from book sales and it is paid every single year. Now there’s something I had no idea about!
  • Story Resolutions: resolutions at the end of novice short stories often come from a conversation. They need to come from both action and conversation and the resolution must be well connected to all of the preceding action that has taken place between the characters. (This is really a note to guard against those neat endings where Character 1 chats with Character 2 and they walk away happily….it’s way too convenient)
  • Virtual Reality as a Device: if you’re going to use Virtual Reality (VR), make sure you explain to the reader what the characters outside the game have at stake. Otherwise, your reader will disbelieve or pay no heed to the action of the VR. It’s like having three pages and then having the character wake up and say ‘Oh, well, that was just a dream’ (in other words the reader thinks - ‘well, if that was a dream, why are you making me read it!)
  • Internal Dialogue: internal dialogue can be useful to giving us a sense of character. In those instances where it is connected with the action, and has a logical link with what the character might be thinking about, use it. But where it is used for exposition, to simply tell the reader something important to the plot, that doesn’t relate to the previous action, get rid of it. For example, if you have two characters talking about going to the shops, don’t have one character suddenly start thinking about how they embarrassed themselves on a date ten years ago. You could though, have them think about a shopping list. Simple example, I know, but hey, it works.
  • Metaphor: If you know the metaphor of the story (the most powerful stories deal with myth and metaphor), don’t bring it to the explicit attention of the reader. Have it work subtly, if you can, through abstract images. For example, in Thelma & Louise they apparently have water in some shape in the background during every scene where Thelma & Louise are facing adversity. But at the end of the film, they’re driving on a hot day in the desert, with the words blaring ‘I can see clearly now the rain is gone’. What they don’t have is them say ‘oh no, we’re facing adversity again, what shall we do’. I know, I know, I’m still figuring this one out, but there’s some sense in it. Metaphor/myth is also something a lot of writers never think about consciously, they just let it come, because if you think about it too hard, it will show too prominently in the story and its effect is lost.
    Detail: Originality often lies in the detail of the story. Especially with Science Fiction, as so many ideas have been done before. But if you can tell a story that’s similar to something else, but make it unique and alive through its detail, you’ll have a good shot at a good story. For example, ‘The Unforgiven’ with Clint Eastwood used things common to other Westerns, but the way that film dealt with unique detail (ie. the character coming back from years of a ’straight life’) were unique. Actually, I might be wrong, I’m no huge western fan, but you get my drift.