Writing is like Weather…

For those who don’t know, I live in Minnesota. The weather here is a perennial topic; the news reports the temperature every hour on the hour, and every fifteen minutes (it seems like) when it’s particularly unusual. People talk about the weather constantly. Yesterday, I overheard at least five sets of people have the exact same conversation: “Boy, it’s cold.” “The weather report says it’s supposed to be warmer tomorrow.” I had that conversation myself at least twice (it would have been four times, but once was with three people listening in).

The thing is, what do you really need to know about the weather and why? You need to know what it is doing out there when you are getting ready to go out, which you can find out by looking out the window (“Yup, there’s three feet of snow out there.” “Hey, it’s raining, better take an umbrella.”) If you are trying to plan ahead, you might need to know what it is likely to be doing in a day or two (but if you are planning farther out than that, forget it. The Weather Service does its best, but its best is seldom reliable enough that one can confidently leave the umbrella at home when preparing for something five days out, much less weeks or months. Though if all you need to know is “Will I need snow boots or sunscreen?” there are at least six to eight months out of the year where that’s an easy question to answer, as long as you know what latitude you’re going to be at.)

Writing can be a lot like weather. Writers can get so bogged down in the minutia of phrases and sentences and micro effects that they lose track of the overall impact they’re trying to achieve. When the temperature is 7 degrees Fahrenheit, a couple of degrees up or down doesn’t make much difference except in conversation – the really important thing is that you need a coat and gloves if you’re going out.

With writing, though, the overall impact is composed of hundreds and hundreds of things happening on the micro level – the cumulative effect of three hundred or more pages of words and phrases and sentences. Every writer I know is all too aware that an infelicitous phrase in the wrong spot can spoil an emotional impact that’s been carefully built up over many chapters. But is it really necessary to spend hours agonizing over whether to call one’s villain a megalomaniacal idiotic psychopath, an idiotic psychopathic megalomaniac, or a psychopathic, megalomaniacal idiot?

Well, sometimes, maybe. The trouble is that writers seldom face a situation in which every single word, phrase, and sentence in a 100,000-word novel is worth that kind of conscious attention. Convincing writers of this is difficult, though, especially when the majority of critique groups are set up to focus on micro-level writing problems…and when a lot of writers have so many micro-level problems that fixing even a quarter of them often makes a perceptible difference in the quality of the finished product.

Yet I’ve also seen writers who are trying to make certain that each phrase is so polished and perfect that they neglect the macro level completely. They’re like someone trying to make a mosaic out of precious stones, who polishes each individual stone to perfection but forgets to place them in an order that actually creates a picture, or even a pleasing design. And then they wonder why Mary B. Author not only outsells them, but produces four or five novels in the time it takes them to finish one first draft. They fail to notice that Mary’s characters are engaging and her plots intriguing in spite of her slightly clunky prose.

Of course, it is entirely possible that Mary’s books would be improved – perhaps even significantly improved – by a bit of attention to word choice and phrasing. What the folks who sneer at Mary’s work nearly always fail to recognize, though, is that their work could be significantly improved by more attention to the macro level stuff, like structure, pacing, overall plot and character development…which are Mary’s strengths.

Which is not to say the writers should ignore the micro level in favor of the macro level, or vice versa. Every writer has personal preferences, both in terms of what they like to do and in terms of which aspect they think is most important or deserves the most attention. A writer who is unhappy with his or her work is unlikely to get much done, which makes it difficult to practice or improve. The trick is in persuading oneself to work on both aspects – the one one likes and thinks important, and the one that’s no fun and minor.

That said – I’m currently soliciting blog topics for future posts. So if you have particular questions, ideas, things you’d like to see me ramble on about, please mention them in the comments. Or if you want me to revisit or expand on something I’ve said before. I don’t promise to get to everything soon, but I’ll try to get to everything eventually. And if you’re too shy to comment, email me, pcwrede@pcwrede.com.