Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 2 Volume 9 | Page 10

home from work as I was getting out of my
car.
The beginning took a little more time,
but when I finally figured that out, it was
just a matter of time to sit down between
everything else and start the story.
G ETTING D OWN T O B ONES
I started it on a Thursday evening after
NBC Nightly News. I think I fell asleep dur-
ing the second half and my wife woke me
up. I came into my workroom, had to start
the framework for continuing with the edit-
ing job, did some other stuff and kept put-
ting off starting the story. Okay, I procrasti-
nated almost until the 11 th hour.
 Finally, I saved the file with the title,
which came to me on-the-spot, and
typed.
 I made it to the second paragraph
before Bones came on. Game over.
 About five minutes of work and I
nailed the title and beginning. That
was it for night one.
Friday, we sat down to watch Bill Maher
and discovered it was a surprise repeat.
Since I was expecting to watch an hour of
TV, I opted to read instead, but forty-five
minutes into that hour, I couldn’t stand it
anymore and came back into the computer
room. You see, I take both my TV nights and
my computer time seriously!
I fudged around with the editing job,
then messed around with trivial things,
with no muse in sight. Before I knew it,
with Hawaii 5-0 looming on the horizon, my
muse finally called strong enough to get
down and dirty.
I pulled up the short story file and got to
work. First I read through the two para-
S UMMER 2019
graphs from Thursday night, got my rhythm
going and bang! Twenty minutes later, I
had 1,443 words down. I closed it and
watched Hawaii 5-0.
F IRST E DIT
Saturday morning I did the first edit.
Did I say what I wanted to say? Did I use
the voice I wanted to? Did I make a lot of
grammatical mistakes?
As for grammatical mistake, I made a
few tweaks, but overall, it wasn’t too bad.
No misspellings, but I had a few misplaced
modifiers and I re-worded a few sentences
to fix context. Little stuff. I’m sure my writ-
er’s group will find more.
As for voice? When I caught my muse
for this one, I wanted to make it a first-
person account because the story is about
me, and from my viewpoint. Though I des-
pise first-person in fiction, this is not,
thereby making first-person acceptable.
There’s no or very little dialogue because
I’m not conversing with anyone. The story
is my thoughts and opinions. I’m not here
to liven it up by making up conversations.
So, the voice is me. There’s humor in it as
well as sarcasm. That’s definitely me!
Did I say what I wanted to say? Uh,
yeah! There was one place where I more or
less implied it. When I read it back, I saw
where I didn’t say it directly, but to rewrite
the paragraph and bludgeon the reader
over the head with it was unnecessary.
In the end, I realized it wasn’t a short
story, but an essay, an op-ed? I’d written a
humorous opinion piece. It was exactly
what I wanted to say.
This process took a half hour.
W RITER ’ S G ROUP
P AGE 5
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE