Interjections! Excitement! Emotion!

Interjections (Aw!) show excitement (Darn!) or emotion (Hurray!).
They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong.
  –Schoolhouse Rock

Well, it’s time for a little bit of honesty here. After all the excitement! of getting requests for Steam Palace from agents, the response so far has been less than enthusiastic. Damn!

A couple of the rejections have been nice without any kind of feedback except the “it’s not quite right for me” to the depressing “needs editing, show don’t tell” kind. I’m still waiting to hear back from a few more agents, but I’m getting the sense that it’s not quite “there” yet. Flibbertigibbet!

I had another epiphany last week during during a local talk by Bill Kenower, editor of Author Magazine. He was talking about the “Rules of Writing” (BTW one of his  is, “there are no rules”), and he presented this one:

• Feel First, Write Second

Which is to say, “write the emotional change(journey) of the character, not the physical change of the scene.” I went, “huh?”  I’d never thought of it that way. I’m a procedural, “this happens then that then he says this etc.” Like a programmer: x=x+1;

Here’s what he said (paraphrasing): “What does it feel like for your POV character to do all these things in a scene? Don’t just report on the rain, let the reader know what the rain feels like.”

I don’t know what happened, but I had a “light bulb” moment. Yes! I’ve been aware of “show don’t tell” for a long time, and really struggled with it (as do many writers) because my mind pictures the activity of the scene as if I’m a faraway observer. I’ve thought about putting a “camera” over a character’s shoulder, in their eyes, above the room, but I now see that maybe all those directions are wrong. Consarnit!

Maybe what I need to do is turn the damn! camera around and point it at my POV character’s heart. And keep it pointed there. Because what happens outside of their heart doesn’t matter. Maybe this is a key piece of “show, don’t tell” (or deep POV).

So I went through a scene and added all kinds of emotive language. The scene now just feels different. It doesn’t read like my writing, and I feel like I’m being hammered with my character’s emotions. The thing I’m worried about is that all this new emotive language is just telling on a new level—telling the reader the emotions. Curses!

So the jury’s still out. I don’t think that this is my only issue with Steam Palace but at least it’s something I can work on.(Reducing word count, scene transitions, suspension of disbelief are some other issues, For the Love of All that is Holy!).

Interjections show excitement or emotion,
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah... YEA!

Darn! That's the end!