Journal: North of Normal

“Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right”

― Amy Joy

Weaving words together so they reveal a story incrementally is part of the craft of writing I love. It is magic when it works; it is crap when it doesn’t. I could write North of Normal in a day if I just wrote this happened, then that happened, culminating in The End. I would be cheating you, the reader if I did that, and you would throw the book away and never pick up another one I authored. Describing vs. labeling feelings, emotions, and thoughts make me dig deep to discover what the physiological description would be.

Like anger - how would you describe the state of your body and mind when you get angry? Does your face feel hot, your eyes squint, your hands curl into a fist, and your heart pound through your ears, drumming everything else out? If I can nail the description vs. the label, I am inviting the reader to step into the page and be a part of the story instead of being only a reader.

But boy, is that difficult. I have sweated over descriptions, and at times I worry I have overdone it, putting too much of a description. It has to be believable; but not only that, believable for each character. Take Thomas (a character from Success Is The Best Revenge) for example. As an abuser, his anger was easy to describe, but describing Sara’s anger was hard for me. She was a passive character and put up with Thomas’s abuse. I tried to imagine what words would describe her hidden anger. Even though Sara’s story was my story, it was painful trying to describe rather than label it.

Having typed all that, I am still passionate about writing and its challenges. The frustrations I have working to write with the best description, the best attention-grabbing sentence, and struggling with how to end a paragraph and a chapter that encourages the reader to turn the page are diminished by having accomplished a well-written scene and/or chapter, and am encouraged to continue on.

What are your favorite books you have read and why? How did the writing keep you turning the page?