Flat writing

[booklover33]

I recently posted (My young man) writing from personal experience. Email replies were charming. My feeling though is perplexed. Is the aim to write as one feels and has actually done or to embelish? Although I enjoyed the catharsism of writing, my piece within the group submissions reads as "flat." Yet to spice my words would be false. If it didn't happen I can't "make it up."
Anyway, thank you for allowing my story on your site. I'm more than happy to receive reader comments. Especially their remarks that I'm not the "usual" kind of author.

Sincerely,

Diane

 

[cymbidia]

Hi Diane.

Everything i've written at Lit is more-or-less fact-based. I'm not a real writer in that i don't seem able to pick a plot out of the air and fashion it coherently into something of beauty, heat, and value. I need my own (perverted!) reality to give me a jumpstart.

That said, once i've been there-done that and i have the basics down in pixels, it's time for making magic. People like us who write from experience need to be able to take what was *really* heated in person and transform it into something *really* heated according to the eyes and pulse of Josephine Reader.

That almost always requires some delicate embroidery of the facts.

What was hot when you did it will almost always require some rearrangement of the events, some additional dialogue, or some addition of attire or setting. You have to add and rearrange your reality story, babes, cuz a good written story of your events requires you do that.

Such is not lying.
Such is not mangling the essential truth of your story into unrecognizable form.

It's simply doing what needs to be done to insure your glorious adventure doesn't come off as flat and insipid when others read it.

That said, we're all our own worst critics, aren't we? It's probably not as flat as you imagine it! If you wish, you can go back, rethink it, rekink it, reword it, resubmit it. Lit/Laurel is very forgiving about resubmissions. Everyone here wants you to do your best. Sometimes that comes AFTER you've submitted something, to be honest.

Hope this helps a bit.

 

[Weird Harold]

my piece within the group submissions reads as "flat." Yet to spice my words would be false. If it didn't happen I can't "make it up."

from your story
How to begin?

An older lady. My daughter insisted I get a computer. My faithful ink and paper out of date.

Was the ommision of "I am an older lady" and "...ink and paper are out of date." intentional?

When your reader has to fill in the blanks too often, it makes reading difficult. The harder areader has to work, the less interesting what they are reading is.

My initial thought was that you were writing with too much passive voice. Purdue University's Online Writing Lab says "...overuse of passive voice can make your prose seem flat and uninteresting." I've found that as little as 2% passive voice can start to prove that prediction.

 

[Ray Dario]

Flat Writing

The excitement of the events in a story do less to make a story interesting than the writing itself. Think of some of the most popular novels. "The Great Gatsby" and "Grapes of Wrath" leap to my mind as examples of reasonably mundane events, at least in the context of literature, that are made interesting and emotional by great writing. It is true that exciting events help the author build an exciting story, but with a poor writing style even exciting events sound flat.

My advice to any writer who feels their story is flat: Reread your story and rework each paragraph one at a time. Take out the passive voice wherever you see it. Use a thesaurus. Expand your vocabulary but make sure the word actually fits. Replacing "Hate" with "Disgust" is not always proper even though the thesaurus suggests it.

If you are not satisfied after two re-writes, step back and do something else for a couple of days to give yourself some distance from the story and then re-work it again.

Writing is a lot of work for all but the most awesomely talented, and I suspect even for them, though I wouldn't know first hand.

Well I know that a lot of people will disagree with my comments, please realize I am not attacking anyone or even anyone's writing. I am relating what I try to do when I write a story and I hope that it helps someone.

Ray

 

[Weird Harold]

You have anonymous feedback

Please let me know if you got it.

 

[booklover33]

Thank you

Thank you for the comments and to the kind person who emailed.

Regards,

Diane

 

[Weird Harold]

Re: Thank you

Thank you for the comments and to the kind person who emailed.

You're welcome, I wasn't sure the anonymous feedback would work because you don't have your e-mail display enabled anywhere else. If you have questions, My e-mail is available below, and should have been included in the anonymous mail. (If it wasn't, let Laurel know as it means there is a bug in the anonymous mail function.)