Things I Want to Do Better!

It's been a long time since I posted here---more than a month, possibly---and I want to touch base with my readers, about what has been happening to me.  (I will not remark about World politics, except to say that the Russians seem to be acting in their own interest, which is not new.  This only makes sense if all that they need can be supplied from within their sphere of influence.)

OK, let's get back to my reading.  I have been reading up a storm; these books are not difficult to read, because they're seldom more than 20,000 words long; often a lot shorter.  I do get the impression that the authors---most of them women---seem to depend on their book sales in order to make a living, so they have to strike a balance between satisfying their needs to tell a certain story, or a story in which certain things happen, and a story that grabs the reader.  To make it worse, I never buy an ebook that costs more than $4, so it is possible that I'm not getting the best books.   (On the other hand, I seem to see that there is no connection between the quality of a book and the price the author sets; and maybe we shouldn't expect there to be one.  After all, like L'Oreal, it all depends on how much each author think she's worth!  Haha.)

I have been making some of the points below for several posts, so some of them may come across as Old News.

First of all, many of my own books were excerpts of a single story; a lengthy biography of a fictitious person.  But that biography was not conceived to be readable, or have any of the properties that an author of commercial fiction would be ruled by.  I made Helen have lots of girlfriends, lots of sex, lots of talent, travel a lot, be athletic, be beautiful; in short all the things I wanted, and could not have!  But all these desires did not make for a good story.  When I started chopping the Big Helen Story down to little chunks, I began to see how a few chapters here, and a few chapters there, made a story on their own; especially the early adventures of Helen and Lalitha, which form a beautiful story, for which I really cannot take any credit, and reveal a lot about Lalitha, and Helen, and the children, and Lorna.  The other chunks just barely qualified as stories; and many of them suffered, without the earlier episodes to round out Helen's character and personality.  In contrast, the professional authors who write for Kindle/Amazon, really try hard to make a story with a happy ending, and for the most part, succeed.

The adventures that summer at the beach were also important, but that doesn't mean that it was interesting to read.  But I wept at the foolishness of Helen, which resulted in so much heartbreak for Amy, and Hattie, and the lawyer Miss Pearson, just as anyone who might have read the book would have. 

The Kindle stories  varied widely in the mechanical quality of the writing; some authors wrote beautiful, expressive, fluent prose, that really nailed what they wanted to say.  I could tell what they wanted to say, just from the context, and being just a step or two ahead of the typical reader, knew what they wanted to say, and I could tell whether they got it across.  However, some authors really struggled to do it.  Some of them got tripped on homonyms.  For instance, the words bear and bare sound the same, but there were instances where an author would write something like "the unbareable agony of having to wait".  There were occasional difficulties with plurals: flys, instead of flies; and with tenses: swum, instead of swam.  As I said before, in a previous post, some of these problems---especially with the homonyms---can be explained by the authors using Dragon Speaking software, or something like it, which takes dictation, and converts it into text.  And if this software is now created by non-native English speakers (or had been, all along), that fact would explain why there might not be routines to eliminate those sorts of problems.

Obviously, from the point of view of these sorts of mechanical aspects of writing, I would find it easy to pick faults with any writers who were less inclined to absorb mechanical aspects of writing than I was.  Someone who was being trained to teach English would be more likely to submit to being drilled on mechanics, than someone who was not.  (That's sort of a moot point as far as my own training was concerned, because I was not trained to teach English!  Oops; the embarrassment.)

In every story I have written, the romantic thread of the story was always an add-on at the end, except, maybe, in Alexandra, where the lovers meet right at the beginning of the story, and are ripped apart halfway through, and struggle to reunite over close to a 100,000 words.  Any literary masochists ought to read that one.  I should take that one apart, and rewrite the whole damn thing.

Well, I totally haven't (or "totes" haven't, as the millennials say) set down specific things I want to do better; I think the only thing I can do is to write a decent love story from scratch!

Kay