July 1st Meeting Report

We enjoyed a full meeting this Monday at the Coffee House where we heard and critiqued six readers. Gregory Kompes gave away a copy of "Elements of Style" in a drawing. Fred Rayworth was the lucky winner to get a copy of this excellent writing book.


ANNOUNCEMENTS:

If you'd like to attend the Vegas Valley Book Fair in November contact Jay as soon as possible. Henderson Writer's Group will have at least one booth, but given that there is not room for more than two or three authors per booth, we need a head count so we can reserve enough space. The cost is $40 per booth.

Dues are due in August. It's $40 for the year to be a member of the Henderson Writer's Group, and if you are a member you can read at our weekly meetings and receive feedback from the group. You also receive a discount at the Las Vegas Writer's Conference.

Janelle, who is a member of our group that lives out of state, recently learned that her mother has stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Our thoughts are with her. If you know Janelle, send a card or note of support.

Maxwell Alexander Drake will be coming to our 2014 Las Vegas Writer's Conference.

Coloring for Chemo Fundraiser:

The July Writer's Pen and Grill is a fundraiser for Coloring for Chemo and will begin at 6:30 PM on Wednesday, July 10th. Look for us on the patio at PTs Gold (S. Buffalo and I-215). Please bring new coloring books, crayons, paints, markers, or a check to donate to this worthy cause.

Cancer can be a very dark thing, but Coloring for Chemo makes it a little brighter by bringing baskelts full of coloring books and crayons to cancer patients. Their mission is to supply chemotherapy units with baskets filled full of coloring books. They believe art therapy is a healthy and beneficial tool int he healing process, both physically and mentally. Coloring for Chemo is a non-profic foundation focusing on bringing art therapy to cancer patients and their families. Please invite all your friends!

If you can't attend you can give your donation to Gregory at the next meeting.


BRAGS:

Congratulations to Donald Riggio on recording a radio interview with Belemont Internet Radio.


QUOTE OF THE NIGHT:

"Once again you had someone throw up her hands. 

You don't throw up your hands, you throw them up. They're still attached!"

WRITING TIP from Jo Wilkins:

Use details in your writing. 

I found a great example for using detail to show and not tell from a booklet by Vijah Schartz. 

Bad ex.: The abandoned factory sat before him, empty and cold. 

Good ex.: Watching his breath fog, he shivered against the cold. When he called out to his friends, his words echoed through the cavernous abandoned factory. 

Which do you think paints the better picture for the reader?

UPCOMING MEETINGS:

Our next weekly meeting is Monday, June 8th, at the Lutheran Church on Tropicana. 


ARTICLE:

Be Your Own Toughest Critic

by Morgan St. James

Unfortunately many of us breeze through the masterpiece we have convinced ourselves is a final draft, then either rush to submit it or publish it. If you’ve done this, you are not alone. Have you checked, double checked and then checked again to make sure your manuscript doesn’t have repeated words, phrases or even repetitious full paragraphs? What about misspellings, wrong forms of words and more? If you’ve ever read the book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, you know what poor punctuation can do to the meaning of those words you crafted so carefully.

See, there are a ton of things that tend to fool the eye and they are sneaky little critters. Even though the errant words dance before you, it is easy to look right past them.

Just this week Donald Riggio discovered two words that were repeated in the proof for the Advance Review Copy (ARC) of my latest book, La Bella Mafia. That book was gone through so many times by our editor, proofreader and me, my co-authors, plus various early readers and it slid past all of us. Donald was the only person who saw it: Page 45, 3rd paragraph...two words were unnecessarily repeated: “when I when I.” Hopefully that was the only such repetition that wasn’t spotted, but imagine a manuscript filled with such faux pas.

Writing tight and scrupulous editing is one of the most important parts of being a good author. It is what creates page turners instead of causing readers to become bored or, worse yet, stop reading completely.

If the reader happens to be an agent or publisher, you’ve just wasted your one shot at them. If someone bought one of your books that rambled all over the place or was filled with errors, they will probably be critical even if they liked the story. In fact, they might be disappointed enough to avoid buying any of your future books, citing quality as the reason.

Here are a few things that you not only can, but must do before hitting the submit button.

Check for repetition—a sure way to tighten up your manuscript. I just finished reading a book that reiterated certain details in chapter after chapter so many times, occasionally even in the same sentence or paragraph, my mind couldn’t help screaming silently, “I got it already. Let’s get on with the story.” How many different ways can you say the same thing? This author found a zillion of them, but the information was consistently the same. Nothing new in chapter after chapter after chapter.

It was a shame, too, because the story was compelling. I literally forced myself to finish it although sometimes I wound up with the book covering my face because I’d fallen fast asleep while reading.

Using the same word over and over when it would have read just fine without it is another common error and adds dead weight to your word count. Or, in some cases using other words that mean the same thing would have made the book much more interesting. A writer friend of mine taught me one of the prime offenders is the word “that.” If you use it a lot like I used to, try cutting some of them out and see if the sentence not only reads okay, but is peppier. By the way, when I edited this article, I cut out most of them. Other common word overuse mistakes are “just,” “I,” plus connectors like “and.”

Beginning every paragraph with a proper name for several paragraphs in a row is another common error. That and using too many tags—I said, he said, we said, she said. If the voice is strong, most often your reader knows who is speaking. Do a word search and the results might surprise you.

Long expository descriptions are boring and ring up the word count. So, another way to tighten your writing is not to use them whenever possible. You’ll find the reader really doesn’t want to know so much, anyway. They want to get on with the story. Word pictures are wonderful tools to bring a story to life, but they don’t have to wax poetic page after page after page. Generally a few lines or paragraphs will do the job. Break long narrative with short bursts of dialogue. You can get a lot of information into a few sentences that way.

Don’t go off on tangents, prattling on about something that has no real relation to the action in the story and doesn’t move it ahead. If there is something you really want to get in, you can use little tricks like my sister and I do in our Silver Sisters Mysteries. We found that our twins’ 80-year-old mother Flossie, a former vaudeville magician who performs with her brother-in-law Sterling every Thursday at the Hollywood Home for Has-Beens, has a tendency to want to tell long, funny stories. We used to tell the whole story, but nine times out of ten, it had absolutely nothing to do with the plot and broke the tension we were trying to create. Now when she starts a story, she manages to get in a line or two before Sterling interrupts her and asks if it has anything to do with what’s going on. Invariably she will say, “Nothing, but it’s a good story.” That way we kept her personality but headed her off at the pass.

Above all, though, condition yourself not to jump the gun. Make sure when you present your manuscript to critique groups, agents, editors or make the plunge and self-publish, you’ve done your job and it is as error-free as possible. If you have any doubt about the details of something you are describing, whether you are spelling a word correctly or using the right form of it, take a few moments and check it out online.

My book, Writers’ Tricks of the Trade: 39 Things You Need to Know About The ABCs of Writing Fiction, is filled with hints like this, anecdotes about getting it wrong and some exercises. It reminds you in a humorous way of all of the pitfalls just waiting for writers to fall into them.

Visit me on the web: www.morganstjames-author.com



CALENDAR:

June/July 2013 Sun       Mon      Tues      Wed           Thur           Fri                 Sat
	17 THE COFFEE HOUSE  in Henderson  6:30-8:30	18	19	20	21	22
23	24 Lutheran Community Church 6:30-8:30	25	26 West side meeting at Skinny Dugans 6:30 p.m.	27	28	29
30	July 1 THE COFFEE HOUSE  in Henderson  6:30-8:30	2	3	4	5	6
7	8 Lutheran Community Church 6:30-8:30	9	10 Writer's Pen and Grill	11	12	13
14	15  THE COFFEE HOUSE  in Henderson  6:30-8:30	16	17	18	19	20
21	22 Lutheran Community Church Vital Speaking 6:30-8:30	23	24	25	26	27

Have a good week.
-Jenny Ballif, newsletter editor.