By Renni Brown and Dave King
Book Review by K.S.Loganathan
Renni Brown and Dave King are editors who run workshops for writers intending to give their writing a professional edge and editing their manuscripts themselves before it goes to print . In this book, they describe with numerous examples and exercises, how dialogue , point of view , narrative distance, interior monologue, and other devices can be sharpened to perfect your manuscript .The examples are drawn from published modern writers as well as debutant writers participating in their workshops.
The key issue is narrative distance . The more intimate the point of view, the better ; it creates believable and engaging characters , as in a first-person narrative. The facts are seen through the lens of the character’s history, education, culture, and sensibilities. The narrative distance can be increased to give perspective using the omniscient point of view with apt word choice and syntax.
Since scenes are usually harder to write than narrations, many writers over-rely on narrative summary to “tell” their stories ,sometimes with no specific setting, no specific characters and with no dialogue. In this age of television and movies, narrative summary no longer engages the audience the way it once did, in the time of Henry James. “Showing” your story to your readers through scenes engages the readers emotions, rather than their intellects (which occurs through narration).
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Dialogues must be a compressed version of the characters’ vocabularies and must consistently reflect their speech rhythms ,language and conversational styles. Reading aloud and revising the draft helps maintain consistency in character voice.
Interior monologue, or the expression of thoughts to reveal the character’s personality, is unique to fiction as it can never be employed in visual media . It must be unobtrusive and must match the narrative distance. The authors do not talk of “stream of consciousness” used by James Joyce, William Faulkner and Fyodor Dostoyevsky which is an extreme version of interior monologue.
The manuscript must incorporate dialogue,” beats” ( action bits) and have paragraph sizes no more than half a page to be visually pleasing and powerful. Too many characters and repetitions of words and effects can be counterproductive.
There are 50 excerpts from famous modern writers works to illustrate the principles and nine reviews by critics of author’s shortcomings. Twenty-six classroom exercises are given along with answers. Twelve illustrations by George Booth from the ‘New Yorker ‘ are included.
This course is as meaningful as cursive writing is for learners of English and can be quite helpful in self-editing to first- time authors. It is also a convenient bridge for English literature graduates to foray into modern fiction writing .
