In my experience, there are two kinds of "still-gotta-lot-to-learn" writers. There are the melodramatists, whose prose is so purple it looks like it's trying to hide in a field of violets. These writers are really fun to critique, and I mean that in the best possible way. 98% of the time you can point to the flowery bits and they'll blush and say, "I know..." and strike out the adjectives. Their failing is a direct result of the virtue of recognizing beauty. Purple prose
is often beautiful--it just doesn't fit into narratives as often as we'd sometimes like. If you use it selectively, it makes the rare moments shine.
Then there are those in the "writing should be realistic" camp. No purple prose here. No adjectives. But sitting through a reading of this kind of new writing is excruciating. I once (a long time ago) listened to about twenty minutes of a "story" in which the main character ate breakfast, took out the trash, said hello to her neighbors and looked at their dogs.
Nothing happened. After another critiquer gently pointed this out to the author, she responded, "But it's true. I'm writing about a real person and that's what happened."
I wish I could make a big poster:
Just because it happened
doesn't mean it's interesting.
Some things just aren't worth writing about. Okay, that's not quite true. They may be worth writing about, but you'd better be careful to write about them in a way that's unique or beautiful if you want your readers to care about it.
To be fair, I'd have to hang this poster by my own desk. One of the problems with writing really early in the morning is that sometimes, when I'm running on about four hours of sleep, I write prose that seems like it's trying to lull me back into slumber. I often have to go back later and cut out boring dialogue or random going-from-one-place-to-the-next bits that get in the way of the scene.
I'm lucky, though, because I have a five-year-old daughter. Five-year-old girls, it seems, are natural boring-ness detectors. This morning Lucy and I were telling a "back-and-forth" story--it was the fourth in a series of such tales, and I was getting a little burned out. It went like this:
Lucy: Once upon a time there was a girl named Flora who was so tiny that she wore dresses made from flower petals.
Me: Flora was very hungry. She thought, "Hmm, I sure wish I could have a hamburger."
Lucy stopped me right there. "Um, Mama," she said, "Hamburger sandwiches do not make stories more beautifuller. Now we're going to have to start all over again."
