I said last week that I’d talk a little about what I learned at the Founders Workshop I went to with Stephen Roxburgh.

The first thing I learned is that Stephen hates rhetorical questions.

I had my character asking questions constantly as she went through her life. She didn’t know what to do, so she’d talk to herself. I’m writing in third person but she’s still talking to herself.

So here are a few questions from one small section of the manuscript I sent Mr. Roxburgh:

1. Sober! What had he done? Who did he tell? And why?
2. Repentance gasped. He thought the king loved her?
3. Anger flooded into her soul. Why should he be allowed to threaten her? Why should one man be allowed to kill another on a whim?
4. He was going to hand her over to the prince? Fear gripped her.

:blush: There are so many more. The entire manuscript is full of these little gems.

One of the main problems with these is that they are repeating stuff my main character knows and the reader knows. The prince just told her that the king loved her. So she didn’t have to then think, “Oh he thinks the king loves me.” Likewise, the king had told her he was going to hand her over to the prince. She didn’t have to wonder about it in her head.

But what about the other two examples above? They are not redundant–they are showing her thought process.

I liked how Stephen put this: These rhetorical questions are necessary for the writer when he’s working out the story. The writer needs to know what his characters are thinking. He needs to know the thought processes that motivate them. But once they are motivated and moving, the writer can take out a lot of the process. The reader doesn’t need the step-by-step motivation that the writer needs. To leave all of it in the completed manuscript is akin to a contractor putting up a beautiful building and then leaving all the ugly scaffolding in place. It hides the lovely face you worked so hard on.

Stephen’s suggestion was for me to cut all the rhetorical questions in my manuscript and then to cut a third of the internal monologue that was left. Then I could give the manuscript a read-through and add in only what was needed to keep the reader from being confused.

He said that there is no place as boring as a person’s head. Readers want to see action, they don’t want to sit around listening to a character think.

I can see his point. This makes perfect sense to me.

At the same time, I do believe girl readers do like to get into characters’ heads a little more than boy readers. I may be wrong about that. I do know that the first novel I completed had no internal monologue–it was all show and no tell–and no one got my main character. They didn’t know him and they didn’t love him.

I also think that rules are great, but you can’t apply them universally without making the manuscript bland. If you look sentence by sentence you can cut a bunch, but if you cut too much you lose the flow of the language.

So my plan is to cut the rhetorical questions and then, as Stephen told me to do, look at every section that falls between dialogue and see if I can cut it by a third without losing too much. I suspect that if I cut carefully, I will improve both voice and clarity.

What I’m so happy about is that he gave me specific things to look at and work on. I can do this. It’s not vague direction. He’s saying that dialogue moves the story and too much internal monologue bogs it down. Some of that internal monologue can be changed to dialogue and some can be cut and some can be kept as is. But I need to do it all purposely and not just leave in all the churnings that came about from me wanting to make sure my character was acting in a logical, well-motivated manner.

I remember visiting the desert for the first time when I was ten and finding that it was full of life and color. It was delightful to see the plants and animals that grew in the barren regions.

Today, Nancy Bo Flood took me on a journey to discover a different kind of life in the sandstone of the Desert Southwest.

In Sand to Stone and Back Again, Nancy is not highlighting life, but the changes in the stone.

Did you know that sandstone has a life cycle? It starts as grains of sand which are compressed to make stone. Then wind and water wear it away until it is, once again, broken up into thousands of grains of sand.

The pictures in this book are wonderful. Texture and color will wow you. Oceans full of sand-dune waves and curtains of rock will surprise and delight readers of all ages.

This is one you’ll want to look at over and over.

For more great Nonfiction Monday posts, check out other entries today at Wendie Old’s blog.

Wow! The only thing that could make the Founders Workshops better would be a massage and a facial.

I went to the Editing for Writers workshop taught by Stephen Roxburgh.

I’ll be posting some of what I learned over the next couple of weeks. For today, I just want to sing the praises of these wonderful workshops.

I can’t remember ever being so pampered. From the time David picked me up at the airport, to the time he dropped me back off five days later, I was served by people who acted as if there was nothing they wanted more than to give me an enjoyable retreat. Actually, it started before I even got there with Jo taking care of all the details and getting everything scheduled. Once there, I was wined and dined in first-class fashion. A Highlights editor took us to dinner one night. Marcia, the cook who fed us the other nights, has one of the most beautiful smiles I’ve ever seen—the woman glows—and it is heavenly to be fed by someone who seems so genuinely happy to fill you with good food.

Any of you who know me, know I wouldn’t use the word heavenly lightly. I am dead serious when I say it is heavenly to be served. God serves us at great expense to himself. He wants us to serve one another. This loving, giving, serving stuff is very much a part of the business of heaven.

So, yes, I thought sitting before a meal Marcia made and seeing the smile on her face that said she enjoyed serving people good food, was a foretaste of heaven.

There was more to love than eating and drinking, though. You all know I’m a conference junkie. I love mixing it up with writers. And I will always love big conferences with plenty of talented speakers to make me laugh and lots of agents and editors to meet. But if I had to pick, I’d have to say the Founder’s Workshops are much more my speed. In such a small group you are treated as if you’re a real writer (as opposed to writing conferences where the poor editors and agents are stalked and so they have to throw up protective barriers to keep the unwashed masses off their backs and out of their bathroom stalls). You also meet other real writers–intelligent, creative people–and you have plenty of time to talk to them.

Besides that, you have a lot of one on one time with the instructor–he’s looking at your writing and that is so beneficial. So often I’ve read some bit of advice, but I’ve not known how to apply it to my own work. This opportunity to work with an editor who has read your work and sees the blemishes–like characters who churn in place with endless rhetorical questions–is hugely helpful. Sitting around listening to some of Stephen Roxburgh’s publishing stories was a lot of fun, too.

Stephen is a smart man and a good editor. I highly recommend his workshops, but I’m pretty sure that all the instructors at these workshops are great. Two out of our group of five were on their third workshop and they both said they got a lot out of each one.

I’d like to give a balanced review. I’m sorry…I just can’t think of one negative thing to say about this experience.

I just saw this on my SCBWI regional loop (Southern Breeze).

This group, First Book, is giving away fifty thousand books to children in need in one state. Oklahoma got the books in 2007 and Kentucky got them in 2008. Maybe your state will get them this year. Vote now, vote often, it says.

I’ve been mapping out a new novel and having the mostest fun.

I really learned a lot from reading The Year the Swallows Came Early. I read that book a couple of times and the thing that struck me about it was how there was one unifying theme–things aren’t what they appear to be on the outside–and that theme played out in different ways and in different people throughout the book.

The father wasn’t as good as he seemed. The mother wasn’t as bad as she seemed. And on and on it went with all the characters.

But on top of that the author, Kathryn Fitzmaurice, also made several of the characters deal with the same thing. It wasn’t just Groovy who came to realize that things weren’t what they seemed. The mother came to see that the horoscope wasn’t the truth it seemed to be at first. The father realized that “get rich quick” schemes weren’t the relief from trouble they originally seemed to be.

If you haven’t read the book and you want to study a book in which all the parts work together to serve the whole, you should definitely buy The Year the Swallows Came Early.

So, as I map out my new book, I’m trying to keep these things in mind. I want to have my main character learn something–shirking responsibility does not bring happiness, rather, accepting our God-given responsibility brings peace and contentment.

So I’d like several other characters to deal with this same thing. A child can learn to take responsibility for a pet, perhaps. Maybe, the hero can take responsibility for something his sister is trying to shield him from.

I don’t think we have to load every character down with the same shortcomings. But I do think if we deal with the same problem in various degrees in different characters we can make the books richer.