Digging

Of all the useful abilities a writer can have, I'd put digging near the top of the list. Anyone can outline a plot, but it's when you flesh it out, dig into it, that you're really rolling.

Oracle has been a prime example. I started out with chapters which, in my mind, covered all the ground they needed to in two pages. After a few months of people telling me to slow down and expand, or face the consequences of an irritated critique group armed with sharp and aerodynamic pens, I buckled down and did what they told me to.

At first it was really tough to go into a scene and put so much thought into how I could add to, for instance, a bit of dialogue that was a few sentences long. And yet, after I started to dig, I came up with more and more. I added a bit of description about body language, or anything anyone was holding, or a bit of description about what was happening in the background... After a while, what I would previously have written in a paragraph became a whole page.

More recently, I've been having the same thing happen on my other blog. A while back I added a few quotes from the bar. Then I added a few more. Now the blog is bar-laden and I still have notes on my order pad that I haven't put up yet. As soon as I started digging I wound up with more material than I could have thought possible. My first bar posts were pretty short. My last one was 1,100 words.

The more time you spend fleshing out a topic, story, etc., the deeper you dig. Now, sometimes we get carried away and write a trilogy of novels about the character's teen years, even when the real story doesn't start until the character's thirty-two. So yes, it's totally possible to get carried away. Still, it seems the more common struggle is the opposite.

Since the theme of this month is revision, keep a shovel in mind this month while you're going back to what you've written. Chances are, you could probably dig at least a little deeper.

Alternately, just for giggles, take something out of the piece you're revising - a minor character, one of the props, or even that scar on your protagonist's arm. Get a fresh sheet of paper. Start writing. Say as much as you can about it, everything you can tell about its description, history, significance, etc. Then, once you've done that, write another page about it. See what happens.