I've been meaning to write down my thoughts about language and structure in drafting and revising novels, but this crazy iMac kept distracting me the past few days. Now that the honeymoon with the new computer is about over (I still haven't figured out the movie software yet, but that may be Lizzie's area now), I've been getting back into the fiction writing swing of things.

As I look over the last section of my baseball book and tweak some things with the new novel, I've been thinking a lot about language. Using the right language for the storyline -- should I be more traditional and just tell the story in a linear way, or mess around with flashbacks and jump around in the timeline to add details that sort of accrue without the reader really noticing?

I think the biggest thing I'm looking for now is preventing the "plodding" sensation that comes in novels, a sense that the author is just jumping through the hoops of the plot to get from point A to point Z. I know I'm guilty of that in the first draft. But I guess that's what first drafts are all about -- just connecting the dots.

Better writers, I think, make those first drafts more fleshed out, throwing in tons of detail, probably more detail than is needed, so that revising is just a matter of removing the extraneous stuff. I'm working on that with Sixteen Miles, trying to really breathe life into each scene, packing it with emotional and physical details, smells and sounds and tension and so on. But sometimes, especially when I'm floundering, I resort to just connecting the plot dots.

And surprisingly, when I go back for the second pass, it's not as ugly as I feared.

What helps me is looking at published books, to see how the pros do it. I like how Annie Proulx writes, because it feels disjointed sometimes, and she uses wacky words (like "hive-spangled") that stick with you and run through your head after you put the book down, and her paragraphs are full of fragments and images. William Gibson does a great job as well with his prose and how he sets up his scenes -- it's not the way I'd do it, and I watch and learn.

Another thing I noticed as I flipped through books by Proulx, Gibson, Graham Joyce, Ethan Canin, and Charles Frazier this morning was the sheer amount of detail and knowledge -- insight -- available on any given page. Those little tidbits fascinate me. I guess I just love learning little factoids, like what sort of clothes someone would be wearing on a boat leaving San Franciscon in 1923, or the way flies hang over a hospital ward during the Civil War.

It all reminds me of how much I have to learn. It's daunting, but I like a challenge.

Finally, Richard Parks has a great essay about authorial voice vs. story voice. Are you a hedgehog or a fox?

And that's it for today. Later!