Getting Into the Big Time

I have been a small-time writer for years. Every day I put up my ads stating how I will write your story for you, and when I get a client I pour my heart out onto the pages for him, over and over again. My clients have all loved the work I do for them, but perhaps I don’t charge enough. Finding just the right words to tell someone’s story is real work, after all. And, I put in about ten to twelve hours a day, every day, doing this.

But this last week, I picked up a client who paid my way out to a distant city to meet him, just because he liked my writing that much. And, for a few days, I felt as though I was beginning to get into the big-time. That is indeed a heady experience for someone who has spent the last several years working to perfect her craft, and working hard for mere pennies a day.

The art of telling a good story on paper involves bringing the reader into the story. What a nebulous phrase that is! It conjures up an image of the writer emerging from the page of text, ink-stains and all, grasping the reader by the hand and pulling him into the page with him.

Come to think of it, that is what the words we use must do for our readers. The descriptions must be clear and to the point, though they can be used to evoke mood, much the way scenes of storm clouds and lightening bolts were used that way in those movies out of the 1940s and 50s. But most of all, there needs to be enough description that the reader can picture himself standing beside the writer in the midst of the action. Better still the reader should be able to see himself as the main character in the story, experiencing everything that happens, just as that character does.

And, the only way to be that good with it is to write, and then write some more. And when you are not writing, you need to be reading. Reading most of all for the shear pleasure of it, but also reading analytically, to understand how the story is told. Does it work for you as it has been told, and if so, why and how does it work? Or, does it fall down, and if that is so, how would you fix t to keep the scenes rolling along, and keep the characters believable?

Writing is an art. And, as with any art, there is never simply one answer to those questions. Remember, the best answers are yours.