Welcome to my new novel, A Suitable Bride. Impossible love, the dire need for an arranged marriage and a happy ending firmly place this novel into the Romance genre. And yes it’s set in the Regency era.
I got lovely feedback from my first novel A Suitable Heir so I hope my readers will enjoy this second foray into my favourite time in history.
The book will be available from the 30th April in both e-book and print copies. Please visit my website www.elsiekingauthorartist.com for links to purchase on-line.
I read an article by Draft2digital that said the best marketing for your first book is to publish a second. I certainly hope that this is true. Enjoy.
Ever since the very earliest times of mankind there have been folk who seem to be driven to want to collect and study things around them – right up to the children of today who collect rocks or insects or… as well as those who can’t seem to resist dismantling anything they can get their hands on just to “See how it works, Nan”. When they grow up they might become a motor mechanic; a scientist; a…
Those who are fascinated by languages; how people speak; how words can be put together; how they are pronounced; how those languages themselves change over the centuries are termed “linguists”. I’m not talking here about those folk who speak several different languages; who seem to be able to pick up a new language apparently effortlessly. No, I mean those who want to come to grips with the nuts and bolts of either languages in general or one language in particular.
As far as English is concerned these “language scientists” (linguists) have decided that all the words of our language fit into one of two groups – no not nouns and verbs – but content words and function words.
The thousands upon thousands of content words are the ones you can get some sort of picture in your head; so long as it is within your own field of experience. These are words like horse or run or blue or slow or fight or…
The function words on the other hand are those that many school teachers will tell children are the “little words”; the ones that make no sense on their own alone; no sense until they are linked to an appropriate content word. Consider for a moment in/on/by/at/out/of/off… You need to link them to words like house or horse or horrid or happy and you can start to get a picture.
All in all there are only about a couple of hundred of these important “little words”. Use the wrong one in the wrong place and your writing can easily become confusing or even meaningless.
Consider for a moment “the” and “a”: many of us use these more or less indiscriminately, not realising that each has a specific meaning and must be used with care when writing.
“A” is generalist – yes, it is a word even though only a single letter; a dog/ a house/ a person are all non-specific – any dog, house or person whatever the size, shape, colour…
“The” on the other hand, is much more limited: “the dog” is one particular dog involved in a particular action; “the house” could be the one next door or the one you lived in as a child; or etc…
So, use with care. Please.
A couple of other points: “an” is merely “a” used when the next word begins with a vowel, e.g. “an apple”/”an orange” etc. but even this is not so simple (wouldn’t y’ know it!!) as most of us have been taught that vowels are the letters a/e/i/o/u. Not so.
Vowels are sounds; speech sounds, that is. And it is the beginning sound of the next word that governs the use of “a” or “an”. Just say aloud to yourself “a happy holiday”. No problem? Now try it again but with “honourable person” instead of “happy holiday”. Not so easy, is it. “An honourable person” is much easier to say because the letter “h” is virtually silent.
Forget using letters to decide whether to use “a” or “an”; go for the sound when you say aloud whatever it is that is puzzling you. We do this without thinking when we are speaking so go for the spoken word/phrase if in doubt. Much simpler than trying to remember a bunch of rules along with their exceptions. There are always exceptions!!
There is more to say about function words, their glitchy bits and the angst they can cause those of us impelled to write but we’ll leave it for another time.
I’ve never really understood or considered tropes when I write something. I find it easier to write with a theme in mind. But Tropes are apparently important enough in the romance genre to provide the theme for the Romance Writers of Australia conference 2024. Time to do some research.
The Collins Pocket English Dictionary defines a Trope as ‘a figure of speech.’
The Collins National Dictionary is more extensive. It defines Trope as ‘a word or phrase used metaphorically.’
Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases links Tropes with metaphors. And a metaphor is a way of describing one thing with a phrase that describes something else.
Examples: Courage – a heart of a lion
Love – the light of my life
Lazy – a couch potato.
A look at Wikipedia (bless them) says that the word Trope has undergone “a semantic change” and is now used as a rhetorical (persuasive) device in creative works.
So, to summarise: A trope used to be a figure of speech but has morphed into a commonly used metaphorical device in genres of rhetorical creative fiction. In simple terms they are the themes that readers want to have in a novel.
Some common romance tropes are:
Happy ever after
Lovers torn apart, fight to get back together
Forbidden love
Love triangles
Enemies to lovers
Amnesia
I have a secret
Some historical novel tropes are:
Marriages of convenience
Dual timelines
Political/social upheavals
Actual historical figures
Protagonists ahead of their time.
Research driven plots.
Fantasy tropes may include:
Good versus evil
Quests
Magic
Mythological species
Time travel
The list of tropes can be extensive for each genre but from what I’ve read it’s important that the trope is subtle, that it emerges with the story or it can become a dreaded cliché. These are tropes used so often they become a bit of a joke. Think of the dreaded Bodice ripper.
I hope you found my exploration of tropes useful. I have discovered that I definitely like happy endings, most of my characters are ahead of their time and some engage in marriages of convenience. I also like to use historical research to describe political and social upheavals.
And these tropes put me firmly into my genre; historical novels with a touch of romance.
My photo is of the black sand beach in Iceland made famous in Game of Thrones. Yet another example where an image can be used as a literary trope.
Now I have to work out what costume I’ll wear at the RWA conference that will clearly define a romantic trope.
I must admit I’ve only begun my journey onto this path. At this stage, it’s more of a side-gig than a career. So, I thought I better do research before spouting words of wisdom about what ghost writing is all about.
After gleaning a few articles online, I realised an experienced and quality writer could make a decent career out of ghost writing.
If only I had known, I could’ve seamlessly transitioned from research writing to ghost writing without a thought…once my boys had both gone to school. Imagine the flexibility, working from home and the money. Extra money for house renovations, more trips overseas, and perhaps a caravan for that longed-for lap around Australia.
But such literary adventures were not to be for me at that time.
These blog posts also advised that for landing a good ghost writing contract, a writer needs to prove their skill and worth by having published a book or two.
Now that I have spent the last fifteen years in writing groups honing my skills, have published five books, and recently set up with my writer friends, Indie Scriptorium Self-Publishing Collective, the time has come to investigate the prospect of ghost writing.
The idea arose out of a recent job I acquired to help a friend who is writing a biography of her mother whose family suffered under the Nazis during World War II. Each week she hands me another handwritten chapter which I type up and expand in places. The story is good, it’s there, but needs glue words and verbs in sentences to make it flow.
I realised that I had become a ghost writer. Or was I a hybrid editor?
In this case, although my friend is paying me an amount that they can afford, I’m doing the work as a favour, more in line with the ethos of Indie Scriptorium where a community of writers trade skills to get the work completed, and the book published.
Hiring a ghost writer can be expensive, but let’s say a person does get a ghost writer and has completed the work. Although some ghost writers claim to be a one-stop shop of the publishing process, it is advisable to have the book edited, test read, and proof read by different sets of eyes. In this regard, Indie Scriptorium might be ideally suited to help an aspiring author prepare their completed manuscript as we have the combined skill set to edit, proofread and design covers for their book. A couple of us can even help those who want to self-publish to upload their competed work onto a publishing platform. Done either for an agreed amount of money or in trading skills.
Is there an option for Indie Scriptorium to offer a ghost writer or two in the future? Currently, I personally, am still exploring this possibility. Such a venture, if undertaken to the best of my ability, would be a full-time task, and my other projects such as my novels, would have to be set aside for a time. The reality is, I still have stories in my head that I want to tell. And I am working on my friend’s assignment. Their mother’s story is one I have been waiting ten years to be told and shared with the world.
These are my personal thoughts on Ghost Writing, but for a more professional view about ghost writing here are a couple of articles you may like to look at.
Yesterday, I was perusing one of my dad’s old exercise books from way back, possibly the 1950’s. There, first page, neatly written in his handwriting, a poem. I had read this a few months back and didn’t think much of it. But yesterday, reading it again, it resonated with me about the beauty of God’s creation. Dad having taught at Hermannsburg Mission, Northern Territory in the 1950’s was particularly taken with the vibrant colours and striking formation of the land and mountains up there. He fell in love with the land and would make regular pilgrimages to the Centre, taking my brother and I, plus other family and friends, on safaris to explore his beloved part of the world.
Incubating an idea for a story is an interesting process. As a novelist my inspiration most often comes from a theme. It might be the rights of women, the importance of family or equality and fairness. At other times the theme emerges as I write.
When I reflect on the themes that are important to me as a writer I can trace the influences on my life. My mother was a strong feminist even before it was a movement. Her actions in life were all about doing things her way, standing up for those less fortunate and being a strong advocate for what she considered right for her family.
My education as a Social Worker strengthened my principles of feminism, justice, equality and being non-judgemental. I learned to respect a person’s self-determination, even if it was outside the norm. I’m also a pacifist and abhor violence and war.
Stop Pushing was a story where the themes emerged without pre-planning. At a writers’ group we were given a ten-minute exercise to complete a piece of writing inspired by a sentence that contained the words stop pushing. I just wrote. Top of my head the story just emerged with flow of consciousness. It wrote itself. I liked the original and took it home to refine. “Stop Pushing” is the final short story and I like to think it is one of my best pieces of writing. I hope readers enjoy it and also look for the themes that are entrenched in the story.
Stop Pushing
It was a peculiar name. Who would ever call a bloke Stop Pushing? Snowy Jones reckoned it was him that got it wrong. Said he had asked the new bloke for his name and got told it was Pushenko, or something foreign like that. Now Snowy was ‘bout eighty-five at the time, deaf as a post and with a few wallabies loose in the top paddock, so it makes sense he got it wrong. Snowy decided it must be Pushing, and that was that.
I never found out where the Stop came from; but it is Australia, and everyone gets called something short that’s fitting. Stop Pushing sort of emerged, settled and became part of the lingo, and that was that.
Stop arrived in the early fifties. Bought Warren, the goat’s old place on the edge of town. The sheila’s tried to do the neighbourly thing and get him to the RSL chook night, but Stop wouldn’t have any of it. But he turned up in the front bar every Friday, have two beers and then go home at closing time, did that all of his life. And he always fronted at the dawn service on Anzac Day, stood at the back, then drifted away like a drizzle on a breeze.
Stop was a funny bloke. You wouldn’t believe he had a sense of humour; and he didn’t! Never smiled or laughed. Ordered his beers with a nod to the barman and said nothing else; to anyone. There were no laughter lines on Stop’s dial. He had deep gauges around his mouth, sunken cheeks and eyes that emerged from the black pits of hell. He was thin as a long dead cadaver and looked no different in forty-odd years.
What Stop did on the small holding we never knew. He kept himself to himself, and we were alright with that. He was quiet, clean, and took up very little room at the bar. After, a few years, his bar stool became a protected zone on Friday nights. “Oi, you can’t sit there, that’s Stops’ corner.”
It was in the nineties and the local fire crew had just mopped up after a blaze that grazed right up to the edge of town. The pub put a couple of hundred on the tab and everyone got plastered, really plastered. A few of the younger fella’s got a bit out of hand; as you do when you face off a fire for the first time. A kerfuffle broke out over some bloke’s missis, and the two Romeos took to some shoving, right into Stops’ corner of the bar.
Stop was jostled, he swayed, then toppled sideways, fell to the floor. The fire chief rushed over and tried for a pulse, but then shook his head sadly. They propped the poor old bastard back up on his stool and raised their glasses in remembrance. Stop Pushing was no more.
Now Stop Pushing could have just faded into obscurity, but a couple of months after the funeral, a bloke in a suit called a meeting in the front bar of the pub. The suit said he was a “lawyer for the deceased known as Stop Pushing.” Turns out Stop was worth a bob or two and left all his money to the town. He was some sort of fancy writer. Not a Steven King type writer, but he did history books which he sold to schools and universities, for a fair bit of money.
Well, the CFS got a new fire truck, the oval got a new stand with change rooms underneath and Warren, the goat’s place, got turned into a community library with meeting rooms and even computers.
He also donated a new park bench at the war memorial. The plaque was short and to the point, “In memory of Stephan Pushenko”
There was a lot of talk about Stop for a few years after his passing. One of the teachers did a bit of digging and found out the poor bloke had come from Poland and done time in Auschwitz. There was some speculation that he was from some rich Jewish family, or he was a Romany or even a poof, but I don’t think that mattered to anyone in the pub.
I reckon Stop found his way to our small place in Australia. He was taken in, given a new name, and left to be himself. He never did anybody any harm and ended up doing everyone a lot of good. Whatever ghosts he needed to bed, he did it quietly.
I like to believe Stop found serenity here. He took in the ordinary life; the fires battled, the footy games won, the cricket games lost, the jokes, the gossip and the yarns. We gave him back a life, and he took what he needed, then gave back in spades.
Visitors to the pub may find it a bit strange but at closing time every Friday, to this day, some joker will raise his glass and shout, “Stop Pushing” and everyone will raise a glass and repeat “Stop Pushing” and have a laugh. For a memorial, you can’t get better than that.
If I had my way, I’d ban alphabet books for all pre-schoolers. Ideally no child should see an alphabet book until it’s at least eight years old and had learnt to write and read. And as for the Alphabet Song!! Grrrr! But we’ll come to that later.
“Why on earth?” I hear you say. Or are you quietly thinking to yourself, “Poor thing, she’s finally lost it”? Or (somewhat more kindly) “Years and years of teaching small children has got to her. Stress, you know.”
Au contraire. It’s the years and years of teaching all those children who came to school singing the Alphabet Song; minds stuffed full of alphabet books with their pages and pages of pretty pics; confident of their ability to master all this reading and writing stuff… Then they get as confused as all get up.
Confused? you say. How come? Isn’t the alphabet the basis of our written language? Yes indeed – but only in a way.
You see the letters of the alphabet are symbols; mere squiggles if you like; that we use to represent the sounds of our spoken language. It’s a code, but sadly, not a straight-forward one for a number of reasons.
Aeons ago, when mankind first sought a way to record information that did not rely on memory (and therefore personal contact) they drew pictures on whatever came to hand using whatever they had that worked. Over time the pictures became stylised until eventually some bright spark got fed up with the labour involved in learning the meaning of thousands of picture-symbols. Whoever it was, they were obviously a radical and an original thinker with particularly good hearing ability in the way of auditory discrimination. He/she realised that it was only a small number of different sounds that were put together in a myriad of diverse ways to make up all the words used by his/her community.
Yes, I know – a flight of fancy. We’ll never really know for sure how it happened, and I seriously doubt if it was that simple. Rather than a single bright spark, I’m sure it was more a process of refinement over dozens of decades with contributions from many as well as adoption by neighbours who adjusted, adapted, added to, subtracted from… to suit their own situation and language.
And this is still happening today – we add words; we invent new ones; we drop ones we see as no longer useful, pretentious, or “bad” or we change the meaning… When I was young and went to a beaut party where I’d had a lot of good, clean fun with laughter, friends, food (really yummy food, that is!) I usually reported that “We’d had a gay old time.” No longer would I dream of saying such a thing. Back in Elizabethan times (the Francis Drake/Walter Raleigh ones, that is) “nice” was a far from complimentary word. Only two, of but many examples.
Anyway, back to my entry point: banning books for babies (alphabet books, that is), if you’ll remember.
Rather than learning the alphabet, it is much more important for little children to learn to differentiate the sounds we use to make up the words we use to communicate with others. Once they can do that, it is an easy matter to learn an appropriate symbol (squiggle!) to match each one. At which point they can write. And reading will follow on. Simple.
Sadly, not so simple because our alphabet is full of glitchy bits: some letters can be used for more than one sound; several letters are used for the same sound; some letters in some words do not represent any sound at all (blame history for that one because they once did). Additionally, we don’t have enough letters to represent all the sounds we use so we solve that problem by putting two together (e.g.: ch/sh/th).
Another problem with these books for babies is that they always partner the two forms of the same letter (upper case/lower case) side by side along with the picture it “illustrates”. This gives the impression that the two forms of that letter are interchangeable which is not so – not at all. Capitals (upper case) should only ever be used when there is extra information to be conveyed.
You’ll notice I put “illustrates” in quotes. This is because one of my pet hates is that so many pictures have little connection with the actual beginning sound of the letter they are meant to represent. To use egg/ostrich/cat is OK. But eagle or eight/owl or orchestra/ chair or centipede is quite definitely NOT. Books using such as these are concentrating on the names of the letters and letter names are no help at all when learning to write and read. They are more a source of confusion and, therefore, frustration.
Reciting the alphabet, singing the song (which means we’ve learned the names of the letters in a particular order) is a handy skill but one we only need when called upon to search for information in written material arranged alphabetically – which no child will need to do until it is able to read competently. To make things worse, the middle bit of the Alphabet Song gets run together, coming out as a single word (elemenopee) so many children think of it as needing only one single letter to represent it. Which is very confusing for them.
To wind up: my biggest hate of all; my absolute bete noir? Alphabet books that have come to us from the USA. The reason: over there what we on this side of the Pacific call a ‘bucket’ they refer to as a “pail”. Which, because a small child’s vision often does not fully stabilise until seven or eight years of age, can lead to awful confusion between p and b for our littlies. This lack of stabilisation can take the form of visual reversals, both side to side or top to bottom, resulting in, for instance, ‘was’ for ‘saw’ or ‘p’ for ‘b’ (or vice versa).
I’m at the tail end of my third novel “A Suitable Passion” (working title). It’s about slavery at the time of the abolition movement and has been the most challenging of my novels so far. It started out as a historical romance and that genre usually has a happy ending. But when a happy ending just doesn’t fit with the history, what do you do?
In a nutshell, the British Jamaican slave trade started in 1655 when the British overthrew the Spanish colonialists and finished on August 1st, 1834, with an Act in the British Parliament that gave slaves in all British colonies freedom. Well sort of, as the wealthy plantation owners in the West Indies managed to finagle an apprenticeship system that gave them free labour for another six years. This system was designed so the slaves could learn to become a paid labour force. Not surprisingly it didn’t work, and the scheme was abandoned 1838 due to the appalling behaviour of the plantation owners and managers. After that, most of the African people in the West Indies walked away, choosing to live in their own villages and grow their own food rather than work for the men who had owned and abused them. The sugar industry collapsed.
To make matters even more unfair, the plantation owners were given compensation for freeing their slaves. Like cows or sheep, slaves were considered property. The slave owners demanded compensation and it cost the British public twenty million pounds (approximately $40,000,000 AU). The money was distributed to some of the richest and most influential families and institutions in Britain. The slaves got nothing. This huge debt was only paid off in 2015.
Into this mix came the abolitionists. The movement started in the mid 1780’s with predominately Quakers establishing committees and making presentations to Parliament. In 1807 the shipping of slaves from Africa to British colonies was banned but slavery continued in British colonies for another twenty-seven years. The abolition movement was slow growing but by the 1820’s the new middle classes became involved. They formed societies throughout Britain to actively work against slavery, many of the societies were organised and ran by women.
The historical research to tackle this book was extensive. I read five different PhD. dissertations to get the social, religious, economic and political dynamics that led to the abolition of slavery. I read first-hand accounts of slaves and the terrible deprivations and punishments they endured. I gleaned information about how the sugar industry worked and even visited sugar museums in Queensland to get a sense of the process of sugar production. I read articles from newspapers at the time and attended a meeting of the Quakers to experience first-hand their remarkable religion.
I set my novel in 1829. The plot revolved around the question:
What if a young heiress discovers her family’s wealth and prestige come from slavery and she is expected to marry a man who will continue the cruel practice of the plantation system in Jamaica? How will she comply with her family’s expectations when she is an abolitionist?
I sent my protagonists to Jamaica where they experienced slavery first hand and confronted their relatives who profited from slaves. I had hoped to end the story on a positive note with my protagonist’s relative having an epiphany and freeing his slaves. But the research could not be denied. There was no happy ending. I could not find one example of a slave owner who showed one iota of compassion and freed his slaves. Avarice abounded and was rewarded and the plight of enslaved people in the West Indies was appalling even after emancipation.
My novel became an exploration of a shameful chapter in British history. I found that I had to follow the history rather than a romantic plot. The romance became a secondary consideration and the history took over. I changed the characters to make the villains more realistic and my protagonists end up together but are powerless to change the outcome for the slaves. A sadder ending than I wanted but I hope the novel sheds light on the history of racism and still delivers a satisfying read.
My venture into the world of Murder Mystery/Crime Writing has guided my path to digging into life and death of a different kind—Family History. Crimes, even cold case crimes are being solved by DNA analysis and technology from which family trees are built.
As I have delved into the realms of ancestry, through the My Heritage site and the wonderful tool of crowdsourcing that is available there, I have stumbled on some historical “crimes” that would make even the resident artificial intelligence (AI) called “My Heritage Consistency Checker” laugh or more likely jump up and down (virtually) in conniptions of frustration.
Before I launch into a few of these amusing tales, I might remind you fellow writers that such errors can easily be made when one thinks the research is all too hard or that editing is boring and makes one fall asleep.
My all-time favourite historical faux pas—I get a “Smart Match” from a fellow family historian who has ticked the box that my great-grandfather, born in 1839, is still alive. Quite a feat, he’d be almost 200-years old if he is. And, if he is still in the land of the living, where is he? I have few questions I want to ask him. His answers, I’m sure would make for great reading. I can see the title now: “How my great-grandfather met my great-grandmother.” Oh, and of course, what’s his secret for staying alive?
For two weeks, ye old “My Heritage Consistency Checker” complained that my dad’s cousin’s grandmother was too young at 14 years of age to be married. Good on it for picking this detail up. More like the morality police than an AI (artificial intelligence) with knowledge of historical context (we’re talking mid 1800’s here in Australia). Anyway, the mystery spurred me down that proverbial rabbit-hole where it seemed, according to official birth and marriage records, a certain ancestor had to get married, if you know what I mean. So, I’m guessing that her parents gave consent for the “shot gun” wedding. The young couple (well, the groom with the shotgun to his head wasn’t so young, but) went on to have at least ten children.
How does this angry AI relate to writing?
You may have developed an uneasy relationship with your editor, or fellow writer/test reader who questions certain details of your story. For example, from my experience, my writing mentor was adamant that a planet can’t have two suns. Another time, a fellow writer insisted that cattle did not exist in Central Australia. I did my research, and armed with the evidence to the contrary, I proved them incorrect.
A friend asked me to type up and edit their relative’s biography. I began reading the story and soon discovered key details relating to birth and marriage were missing or vague. Now, I’m not adverse to a few “circas” now and then. I plop them in all the time when acknowledging my grandfather’s photos in my posts, or when “playing” with my family tree for centuries-long gone ancestors, in the hope a “smart match” or record might show up courtesy of a more obliging My Heritage AI.
But with a biography, a historical record of this person’s forebears, the lack of detail bothered me. I asked the friend if they had any documents. No, they replied, all too hard, and expensive.
So, putting on my Indie Scriptorium hat, and having the resources and research skills, I offered to do the relevant investigation for them.
When writing a history, it is vital to get the right dates, places, times and people. This is true also for drafting a novel or story. If you want your story to be believable, you need to do the research and at least get your timeline sorted. Make note of significant events in that period which may impact your characters. Take time to plot the dates and places to ensure it’s do-able and believable.
There are other examples, but I will reserve those for another time, another blog post.
All my life, words have fascinated me – their meanings and double meanings, along with puns, jokes, and varied pronunciations. How we put them together for impact; to make poems or stories or paint pictures in a reader’s imagination is grist to my mill, floats my intellectual boat.
So choosing English as a major subject when I got to university was a no-brainer. And when I discovered that Linguistics was one of the third year options, I couldn’t wait to enrol.
Before this, High School Latin had opened my eyes to the fact that languages other than English have very different rules; can be structured differently; are often quite a different kettle of fish. This was amazing! Putting the verb at the end of the sentence? Changing the last syllable of the word instead of using one of the “little words” (e.g: to/for/by/with/from…) as those ancient Romans had done? Wow!!
All this opened up the wide world of translation and how tricky it can be to “get it right”; get the original author’s attitude and intentions across accurately; convey as many as possible, of the subtleties of the original.
Conversations with multi-cultural friends, some of whom were fluent speakers in not just two but several languages were frustrating as these people took all the differences for granted. None shared my passion for words; so they quickly found our “chats” boring. And me weird.
Consequently, I was forced to turn to books in my quest for enlightenment. The only books readily available that provided varied renditions of the original text was the Bible. So I go down all sorts of rabbit holes, spanning several centuries of translations in this adventure.
And after all that long-winded background bumph we come to the point of this blog; a blog designed for those of us who write. Finally I hear you say (if you are still with me, of course!!).
A couple of days ago I read and compared several accounts of the Last Supper; that final, pivotal meal before the crucifixion, that Jesus shared with his disciples; the meal which Judas walked out of to meet with the High Priests and betray him.
Several of the modern translations wound up their account with:
“So Judas left, going out into the night”.
Others (including the King James Version) rendered the same incident as:
“So Judas left. And it was night.”
Only a very small difference – a single sentence of eight letters versus two sentences of seven letters.
But it hit me like a bomb.
The strength and implicit emotion; the sense of impending doom, that that second sentence gave when contrasted with the first was palpable. The first was an accurate but matter-of-fact, almost journalistic rendition. The first, set alongside the heart-wrenching vividness of the second, was just ordinary writing in my eyes.
Of course you may not agree. We all see and interpret things very differently. Which is a good thing; makes life interesting!
When we speak we add to our words with both our voice and our facial expressions, as well as gesture, stance… There are a hundred and one ways of getting our meaning across as we become aware of responses from those to whom we are speaking. There is an immediacy in the spoken that is not available in the written. So we have to compensate.
As writers, we need to develop awareness of those aspects of writing that are more than merely putting words together. This is what divides great writing from the simply pedestrian. How those words are arranged, organized, juxtaposed one with the other is important. How our words are divided into sentences and punctuated can make a huge difference to how we get our message across to the reader. These are the things that make our writing truly impactful.
Indie Scriptorium -- Self Publishing Collective 