• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Lyn Fairchild Hawks

YA Author, Teacher & College Essay Consultant

  • Readers
  • Books
  • Writers
  • Teachers
  • About
    • Awards
  • Essay Consulting
  • Contact Me

All in a Hour’s Work

Lyn Hawks · December 22, 2017 · Leave a Comment

 

They say teachers make over 100 decisions an hour. Writers are right up there, too.

Global vs. Local Choices

We face the big plot questions, all those arcs and growth and struggle. There are the back stories of characters that need exploration but not to the point of slowing the pace. I could keep going about the bird’s eye view stuff you always have to keep in mind: the outlines, the maps, the intricate analyses and free writes and imaginings. I’ve got hundreds of pages of notes and far more of discarded ones. These are part of the global decisions, big trends that affect many pages, once decided, like dominos tipping. Right now, as I finish the first full draft, my biggest concerns are these elements.

Then there are the local choices, the line edits. Sometimes, not always, you can attack these quickly while trying to bolster the big patterns and trends. The other day I caught myself wondering about a few. I watched how I made some small choices–yet still important ones–and then moved on. I could wait till the first draft is done, but sometimes, digging into these choices now allows me some greater understanding of who my protagonist is and what my story’s about.

How do you navigate and balance global and local choices in your writing process? Share below!

 

Decisions on the Local Level

  • For example, should my character say, “The guys watch us” or “The guys are watching us”?
  • Or how about “the journalism life” or “The Journalism Life”?

For the first example, the choice is this: present tense or present continuous? I went with the present continuous because I want to convey suspense. I want to show a girl alone at a car wash with several guys there watching her talk to another guy. The action carries immediacy and continuity. I convey the ongoing menace and suspense of the girl’s experience. Check out this Grammarly post on present continuous for more info.

For the second example, capitalization conveys importance, precision, and voice. Wendy Redbird Dancing and Minerva Mae Christopoulos, my other gifted, weird, wise girls, they love capitalization and tend toward capital abuse. This is because for Wendy, drama and deep-seated anger must be outed. There’s a lot of low-grade shouting in her head, which capitalization conveys so well (she’s not an exclamation point kinda gal). For Minerva, she often thinks as a teen journalist in headlines, and she’s also socially awkward and extremely intense, so it makes sense for her to push the rules of language.

Does Audrey, the character I’m forming now, need to work her capitals the same way? No. She’s more mainstream, and though she’s also a journalist, she’s more a hash tagger than a headliner. When referencing her mom, however, a very intense and controlling person, Audrey on occasion will label her mom’s actions in capitals. I can count these times on one hand, and hopefully the snark and sarcasm is stronger because for her its rare.

How Local Helps Global

Now I know two things about Audrey I didn’t know before:

  1. She’s facing danger, and that’s part of her gig as a teen journalist. This is not just the stuff of movies; in my interviews with journalists, they have faced some dicey situations. I need to make sure the job gets rendered right and that I add suspense for the reader.
  2. Audrey’s not dramatic like Wendy–she’s more practical and even keel–and unlike both Wendy and Minerva, much more mainstream. Audrey doesn’t fool with certain rules whereas my other characters question and mock them. Audrey’s intensity manifests with intrepid reporting and basketball fandom. And though she’ll eventually flout the rules, as she delves into the corruption of academic and athletic systems, we’ll first meet her playing much of the mainstream game. The grammar game is a nice symbol for this. There are rules there for a reason, and then there are rules (like some of the NCAA amateurism rules) that just make no damn sense.

So these moments of grammatical choice aren’t so little after all. These kinds of decisions can stop the presses if you’re not careful, distracting you, and they can tangle up the bigger process of pattern building, plot development, and character exploration. (Trust, I’m guilty of spending hours on nitpicking a manuscript rather than generating new scenes.) But the more we master language and style, the quicker we can dip in and dip out of the manuscript with these decisions and actually aid the big-picture process. A local choice can resonate up to the stratosphere of global choice.

Stop procrastinating, Lyn. Time to ascend the heights and write on the ladder of plot arc. Time to soar the upper realms of character. Eyes above, with the occasional glance down.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: editing, editing, global editing, grammar, local editing, present continuous

Want to hear more from Lyn? Subscribe to her monthly newsletter

Archives

  • January 2023
  • July 2022
  • February 2022
  • December 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • November 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • May 2019
  • March 2019
  • January 2019
  • August 2018
  • May 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • November 2016
  • September 2016
  • July 2016
  • February 2016
  • November 2015
  • August 2015

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube

About me

“author

(Photo by My Friend Teresa Studios)

Could I live without words, writing, story? Probably not. I love telling stories. I love teaching stories. I love helping other people find theirs. That’s my story. [READ MORE...]

Want book news and writing tips? Subscribe to my newsletter

From Instagram

Wendy is coming up on her 10 year anniversary! I c Wendy is coming up on her 10 year anniversary! I can’t believe it… And I can’t believe how talented this whole cast and crew was that made this book come to life. Love this clip. @therealslimcaity you captured Wendy, heart and soul. 💜📚💜

.
.
.
.
#bookanniversary #yalit #yabooks #GenX #GenZ #howwendysurvived #booknerd #bookish #wewillsurvive
Keep reading, even if the cat won’t have it😻📚😻

.
.
.
.
#amreading #orangetabby #booknerd
It’s 2013 and Minerva Mae is ready to deliver so It’s 2013 and Minerva Mae is ready to deliver some journo justice. Is it better to go NYT or TMZ when you live in a town that trashes its girls? 
.
.
.
.
#yalit #coverreveal #yabooks #historicalfiction #journalism #authorsofinstagram #authors #author #writinglife #GenZ #GenX

Copyright © 2023 · Lyn Fairchild Hawks