18 Days of Writing and Publishing Tips – Day 15 Be Brutally Honest with Yourself
In trying to get published, it’s important to be honest with yourself about your writing ability. Yes, you need self-confidence to keep going in the face of years of rejection, but you also always need to keep a check on the ego and realize what ways you can improve. Many times a rejection is because a story just wasn’t right for an agent or editor, but other times it’s because the writing actually needs work.
The way I motivate myself to work on my writing is by reading my mentor texts. I couldn’t write publishable books without them to inspire me. Even now, nine years since my first book was published, I go back to certain books and authors to reread their work to know how I should push myself to be a better writer. I admire several different writers, all for different aspects of writing technique.
This post is about my mentor texts for setting and description. Description is one of my two areas of writing I need the most work on and that I struggle with in each book.
The books I go back to when I’m feeling particularly frustrated or when I want to give examples of great description in a writing talk are the first three books in Mary Stewart’s Arthurian saga, THE CRYSTAL CAVE, THE HOLLOW HILLS, and THE LAST ENCHANTMENT. I don’t write fantasy, at least not yet, but the genre doesn’t really matter in this type of mentor text. Here are two paragraphs from the prologue of THE CRYSTAL CAVE:
It was dark, and the place was cold, but he had lit a small fire of wood, which smoked sullenly but gave a little warmth. It had been raining all day, and from the branches near the mouth of the cave water still dripped, and a steady trickle over flowed the lip of the well, soaking the ground below. Several times, restless, he had left the cave, and now he walked out below the cliff to the grove where his horse stood tethered.
With the coming of dusk the rain had stopped, but a mist had risen, creeping knee-high through the trees so that they stood like ghosts, and the grazing horse floated like a swan. It was a grey, and more than ever ghostly because it grazed so quietly; he had torn up a scarf and wound fragments of cloth round the bit so that no jingle should betray him. The bit was gilded, and the torn strips were of silk, for he was a king’s son. If they had caught him, they would have killed him. He was just eighteen.
I think this is just brilliant. I can imagine the scene perfectly and feel the damp atmosphere, and the fire ‘which smoked sullenly.’ Stewart is particularly good at evoking sound in her descriptions: water dripping, and even though the bit is not jingling, describing the muffling of it makes us hear what it might have sounded like unmuffled.
The other brilliant part of her descriptive ability is to impart information about the character and the plot in unusual ways: The bit was gilded, and the torn strips were of silk, for he was a king’s son. If they had caught him, they would have killed him. These two sentences are full of both information and tension, and just amazing.
If I seem to be gushing, it’s because I am gushing. Stewart was one of the first writers I really studied when I was trying to figure out how to write. If you aren’t familiar with her books ( they were published in the 1970s) they are in most libraries and still in print to purchase. Be forewarned, some of the later editions have really cheesy covers. Don’t let that turn you off! The ones in the picture below are fine but I’ve got some editions with covers that make me cringe.
If you missed my earlier writing and publishing tips posts, post 1 is here.
