Writing in the Dead Zone
Working through the third draft of The Volunteer yesterday, I came across a Dead Zone.
This is exactly what it sounds like: ten pages of I-don't-really-care. I looked over the ingredients of the offending chapter. "You're the same as all the others..." I muttered. "Character development? Check! Action? Check! World-building? Yup."
Read up on your writing manuals and the usual cure for a Dead Zone is to cut out excess verbiage and "supercharge" your language with "direct, punchy, active sentences". But I have to tell you, there's a lot more than one way to murder a good story and back in the days when I paid attention to the writing manuals and shot passive verbs on sight, I ended up with even more soulless pages than I do now.
I can't speak for anybody else, but the majority of my DZs are all down to a lack of texture. Too much action with too little variety is a sin I commit regularly, but too much of anything else will have the same fatal effect. Thus, my fix for today's problem consisted of slowing things down with a bit of introspection; throwing in a few lines of the description I often forget about and adding in bright little daubs of emotion.
Finally, I ate some chocolate with an unreasonably high cocoa content. Everything seemed so much better after that...
This is exactly what it sounds like: ten pages of I-don't-really-care. I looked over the ingredients of the offending chapter. "You're the same as all the others..." I muttered. "Character development? Check! Action? Check! World-building? Yup."
Read up on your writing manuals and the usual cure for a Dead Zone is to cut out excess verbiage and "supercharge" your language with "direct, punchy, active sentences". But I have to tell you, there's a lot more than one way to murder a good story and back in the days when I paid attention to the writing manuals and shot passive verbs on sight, I ended up with even more soulless pages than I do now.
I can't speak for anybody else, but the majority of my DZs are all down to a lack of texture. Too much action with too little variety is a sin I commit regularly, but too much of anything else will have the same fatal effect. Thus, my fix for today's problem consisted of slowing things down with a bit of introspection; throwing in a few lines of the description I often forget about and adding in bright little daubs of emotion.
Finally, I ate some chocolate with an unreasonably high cocoa content. Everything seemed so much better after that...
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