{"id":432,"date":"2010-06-20T13:38:06","date_gmt":"2010-06-20T13:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=432"},"modified":"2010-06-20T13:38:06","modified_gmt":"2010-06-20T13:38:06","slug":"strengths-and-weaknesses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=432","title":{"rendered":"Strengths and Weaknesses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For our commentary we need to list the strengths and weaknesses in our writing. I won&#8217;t list what I plan to write are my strengths but I came up with a rather long list of weaknesses, although some are the inverse of possible strengths. For example, one person&#8217;s superfluous dialogue might be another&#8217;s illustration of character or inconsistency of character might also be viewed as adding complexity.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Over-explaining &#8212; insulting the reader&#8217;s intelligence by spelling out what can be inferred<\/li>\n<li>Occasionally over-writing &#8212; though this depends a lot on the reader&#8217;s taste and the genre<\/li>\n<li>Lapse into clich\u00c3\u00a9\/corniness &#8212; in the more emotional scenes I can put in soapy dialogue but when it&#8217;s real emotion I don&#8217;t think it pays to think of clever ways of having your characters avoiding saying &#8216;I love you&#8217; or &#8216;I want you&#8217;.<\/li>\n<li>Balance of interior\/exterior &#8212; I often avoid the interior (could be linked with the POV issue)<\/li>\n<li>POV not clearly enough signalled (or just inconsistent) &#8212; my POVs tend to confuse at times because I&#8217;ll allow the character whose POV I am writing from to infer observations (the other character must have entered the room because the POV character assumed she heard the door open &#8212; perhaps easier to say &#8216;she must have heard the door open&#8217;)<\/li>\n<li>Not \u00e2\u20ac\u02dclistening\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to characters &#8212; being an authorial bully &#8212; thinking &#8216;wouldn&#8217;t it be a great scene for him to parade this other woman before his wife and provoke an argument between them all&#8217; for the sake of creating a dramatic scene when really the characters don&#8217;t want to do that.<\/li>\n<li>Lack of conciseness (inc. superfluous dialogue) &#8212; the universal reluctance to kill your own babies<\/li>\n<li>Consistency of characterisation &#8212; readers thinking &#8216;x or y wouldn&#8217;t do that&#8217; &#8212; but do I do this badly enough to make the reader give up or would be cumulative effect be to increase complexity if done properly?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For our commentary we need to list the strengths and weaknesses in our writing. I won&#8217;t list what I plan to write are my strengths but I came up with a rather long list of weaknesses, although some are the inverse of possible strengths. For example, one person&#8217;s superfluous dialogue might be another&#8217;s illustration of &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=432\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Strengths and Weaknesses&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[1258,353,191,108],"class_list":["post-432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-process","tag-character","tag-commentary","tag-point-of-view","tag-reflection"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":433,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions\/433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}