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:
- Sober! What had he done? Who did he tell? And why?
- Repentance gasped. He thought the king loved her?
- 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?
- 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.
First of all, I’m just a teensy-weensy bit jealous that you went to a Founders Workshop.
But (and this is second of all) at least you shared your treasure with the peasants. I think S. Roxburgh makes a great point. I ALWAYS skip all that internal monologue stuff when I’m reading. I want to get to the good stuff! Action! Dialogue! Conflict! I’d rather get to know a character through what he or she does, not what he or she is thinking all the time. Not that I always write that way, but that’s another story :-)
Can’t wait to hear the rest of your Founders Workshop story (Didn’t that sound a little like Paul Harvey?)
It’s great that he gave specific advice. It rings true, too.
I just went through my file of notes for my novel, thinking I could use big chunks of them in scenes. Now I think it’s only the scaffolding, like he said.
Hi, Cathy! I remember you from Harriette Austin.
Oh, Cathy, you would love those workshops. My oh my, we were so spoiled. And we had so much fun. I laughed a lot. I know you love to laugh.
Point taken about getting to know a character by how she acts and not what she thinks. That’s how we know people in real life, after all.
But in fiction I want to get into the head some. I’ll have to work on this.
The great thing is this. Once I’m aware of a new problem in my writing, I look for that particular thing in every book I read after. So now I’ll look to see how authors get across motivation without telling what the character is thinking all the time. This is how I learn.
And I can’t complain about learning while sitting in a farm house in the Poconos with a wonderful cook filling me with good food and a wonderful editor telling how to make my book work.
Meg, I did tell Stephen that you had already told me to cut the questions. He told me to give you a gold star.
He said, “I had to quit reading. I came upon a stretch with seven or eight questions in a row. I couldn’t stomach anymore. I hope when you see my notes in the margin you can hear me screaming. I wanted to make them all bold and underline them.”
heh heh He was definitely perturbed. I told him he didn’t need to make them bold and underline them because I had a dear friend who had already, very kindly, highlighted all those passages in bright yellow.
I should add, in case anyone is reading this and thinking Stephen Roxburgh sounds kind of mean (he used me as the butt of jokes for days, I cannot lie) the truth is that he is really encouraging, he understands the work, he takes time to understand each writer’s goal and to help the writer reach that goal, and he told me that even though he hated my questions, he loved my story, and he was confident it would be published. And he only made fun of my 5000 page manuscript because he knew I didn’t mind. If I’d have minded he wouldn’t have picked on me.
Hey, Meg! How are you? :-)
Sally, I know what you mean about learning through reading. I keep reading great children’s literature, hoping to soak up a smidgen of talent. I always learn something. I think the trick is to apply it!
And P.S. Now, I’m terribly jealous about that Founders Workshop.
(Y’all take care!)
.-= Cathy C. Hall´s last blog ..Pssst! Finding a Secret Seed Society =-.