By Bob McCrillis
As you may have gathered from some of my earlier posts, I am organization-impaired. I’m sure that must be a recognized affliction since there appear to be so many sufferers in the world.
Symptoms include spending an hour searching for the yellow piece of paper with the title and premise for the story about the Grizzly bear who learned sign language, or the certainty that you’ve already re-written the scene you’re working on, and drawing a complete blank when you try to remember the clever password you came up with for Writers’ Market.
I’m convinced that, somewhere in the compost heap of information on my desk, there’s a best seller. All I have to do is dig it out, then try to read my handwriting. Continue reading “Hope for the Disorganized”
Here’s the situation: Someone had to help my readers understand the progress of the police search for my protagonist. If I had been writing in the third person, it would have been easy – the omniscient narrator could just tell the readers what was going on. Or I could head jump among the characters to keep the reader up to date on the closing loop of the police. Since I was writing strictly from my protagonist’s point of view, someone has to tell him how close the cops are. 
Yay! I don’t have to bother with inconsistencies and impossibilities. Well, maybe not so fast. I remember a person complaining that the book he was reading wasn’t accurate. It seems that he was familiar with Paris, where the story took place, and the places and street names were all wrong. “It ruined the whole book for me,” he grumbled. 
My internal editor pointed out the many deficiencies of my first twenty-five pages. He delights in bashing my fragile ego, doesn’t ever take a vacation or get laryngitis.
Pearl S. Buck Writing Center 