Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Location 583
Make everything serve more than one purpose. Choose your character’s outfits to convey her taste, social status, or personality. Give us someone’s reactions to those outfits as you describe them. Do the same with environment.
Location 898
modes of conveying emotion: action, dialogue, bodily sensations, and character’s thoughts?
Location 931
backstory → personality/character traits → wanting something (motivation) → emotion (felt inside) + emotion (displayed outwardly) What are your characters feeling? Once you know their backstory and current desires, this becomes easy to identify. Then you portray it using appropriate dialogue, actions, bodily sensations, and thoughts.
Location 3378
Constructions to Avoid These constructions (alas, all too common) are redundant, inappropriate, or silly in first person: “A smile on my face.” A first-person narrator cannot see his own face. Also, where else would a smile be? Choose “I smiled.” “An expression of fear/horror/joy/etc. crossed my face.” Same objection as above. “I thought to myself.” Drop “to myself.” Unless your character is a telepath, there is no other possibility. Likewise “I wondered to myself,” “I daydreamed to myself,” etc. “I let my thoughts drift back to ….” In first person, we’re in “your” thoughts. Just show us what you’re thinking, without announcing that you’re thinking. “I remembered my son’s first birthday.” If your character just this moment remembered the occasion, this construction is fine. If not, it’s just more announcing. Simply tell us the content of the birthday memory and we’ll easily see that it is a memory: “On Jim’s first birthday, my husband left me.” “My face grew red” or “I blushed.” The first of these is definitely a POV violation; a person cannot see what color his face is turning. “I blushed” also involves a color change but is probably acceptable because it implies facial warmth, which a first-person narrator can feel. Better might be “My face grew hot.”
Location 3433
the sentence “I wondered if Jane would call today” is a subtle distancing. We are looking at the narrator wondering. Closer inside his head would be one of the following: Would Jane call today? Maybe Jane would call today. Jane wouldn’t call today. She never called when I needed her to. Hope fluttered in my belly, unsettling my breakfast: Maybe Jane would call today. God, I was pathetic, hoping for a call from that bitch Jane. The refrain sounded again and again in my head: Jane. Call. Please. Not only do these eliminate the distance of “I wondered,” but they take advantage of first person’s strength: voice that characterizes. The same is true for less-distant versions of “I reminded myself,” “I doubted,” and “I feared.” Show us the content of that reminder, doubt, or fear in the words and phrases your first-person character would think about them.
Location 3564
important aspect of close third person is that in order to keep it close, you should give us the character’s thoughts as they occur to him, in his diction, and without distancing phrases like “he thought” or “he wondered.”
Location 4113
you should be asking yourself as you turn critic for a single scene: Does the scene have an interesting opening? Do we know where we are, when, and in whose point of view? Can you sharpen any details of setting? Is the POV consistent, without lapses? Does the scene have a good “shape”—that is, does it seem to progress and then finish up with something different from where you started? That “something different ” might be that the character has learned new information, been given another choice, had her problem complicated, been introduced to a new person, discovered a conflict in her values, moved further along a hopeless course of action, etc. But something should be different by the end of the scene or the scene itself is pointless. Will this scene contribute something significant to the book as a whole? Does the scene end in a way that makes us want to read more? Do the details of appearance, action, dialogue, and thoughts develop the character, bringing her into ever-sharper focus? Can you sharpen any details of character? Does the emotion in this scene seem honest and unforced? Is it complex enough to genuinely represent both the character and the way life really is? Does the dialogue sound natural, characteristic, and pertinent? On a sentence-by-sentence scrutiny, do you need to rewrite to eliminate cliches, awkward diction, dangling modifiers, redundant words or phrases, or outright grammatical errors? Do you like this scene? If not, can you articulate why? Is the problem something you can fix?