What This Author Wants for Christmas

by Ane Mulligan @AneMulligan

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and all my shopping is done. I braved the mall early in the month and already it was a zoo. The presents I give are so different from a few decades ago—all right SEVERAL decades ago. Then it was toys and clothes. Now, it's candy, books, and Amazon cards.

Not as much fun but more practical. 

Also more practical is after 45 out of 54 years of marriage—where my husband has gone shopping in December to take advantage of the sales and bought himself everything I had on his Christmas list—I finally learned. I do the same. I'm guaranteed of getting what I want. 

But what I really want isn't in a store. I can't buy it off a shelf. I have to search for it diligently. What is that? Tools for my writer's toolbox. I want to continually grow in my craft, and to do that, I need new tools or refine the old ones.

I recently came across on the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Blog. The post is Whatever Happened to Writing Subtlety, by Arron Gansky. This art goes beyond show don't tell. I think it also deepens the POV. 

Too often, we don't trust our reader to "get it" and therefore explain what we have already shown them. 

Laila's eyes narrow and her lips twist into a mask of anger. "Just because you think he's your—"

I removed the "twist into a mask of anger." The reader gets that. They can see Laila's face and understand she's angry. 

Laila's eyes narrow and her lips twist. "Just because you think he's your—"

I can hear y’all now. “I want to be sure they get it.” I promise you, they will. But if you’re really unsure, you could add something like spittle flies from her mouth. 

I was several chapters into my new book but stopped and went back to see where I could be a little more subtle. After all, nobody wants to be hit over the head, but that's what some of us do even unintentionally. I found at least one place in each chapter where I lacked the art of subtlety.

Thank you, Aaron, for this year’s Christmas toolbox gift for writers.

TWEETABLE

What This Author Wants for Christmas from @AneMulligan on @EdieMelson (Click to Tweet)

Ane Mulligan lives life from a director’s chair, both in theatre and at her desk creating novels. Entranced with story by age three, at five she saw PETER PAN onstage and was struck with a fever from which she never recovered—stage fever. One day, her passions collided, and an award-winning, bestselling novelist emerged. She believes chocolate and coffee are two of the four major food groups and lives in Sugar Hill, GA, with her artist husband and a rascally Rottweiler. Find Ane on her website, Amazon Author page, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, The Write Conversation, and Blue Ridge Conference Blog.