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Transcript

I have no idea where the story is going. I just read the line of the character on line five, the name of the character on line five, and I will read it to you before I share my screen. Henry Kissinger and the alien watch on from the adjoining courtyard with demeanors as cool as the ice in their glasses of brandy. This should be adventure. Welcome to another live edit: releasing your inner dragon. All right, let's find out what Henry Kissinger and his wacky alien sidekick are up to this week.

Okay, so we are back with the live edit, and, uh, my screen is shared. If you're listening to us just on audio, bear in mind that you can watch us on YouTube, where you can watch the document. Okay, so, as we normally do, I'm going to read, and then we will stop and discuss the paragraphs as we go.

Santiago, Chile, September 11th, 1973. Smoke bows from a mortar-torn hole in the patio de la Moneda. In front of the pale limestone façade, a flaming Chilean flag disintegrates into black butterflies. Henry Kissinger and the alien watch on from the adjoining courtyard with demeanors as cool as the ice in their glasses of brandy. Okay, so I'm going to briefly pause and just say we have spoken about present tense before. I'm not going to belabor the point, but present-tense third person is really annoying to read. Just FYI. Just so tough to read.

Yeah, I mean, first person is better than third person. I still struggle with it, but third-person present tense is hard to read, in my opinion. The thing that's amazing to me is how many unpublished writers write in third-person present tense because there are not a lot of actual published third-person present-tense works. So the reason why that's amazing to me is usually people copy the things that have impressed them, the things that have influenced them. Like, why do you write first-person present tense? Oh, because I loved Hunger Games. What's that got to do with your story? Hold on, hold on. This is not first. Here we switch to past. Okay, so apparently we just have one paragraph of present tense.

Oh, okay. Yeah, the ground shook. Glass... yeah. Okay, grammatically, guys, don't do this, okay? Don't switch from one tense to another unless there's a plot device reason for it that you've set up. Yeah, yeah. Now, for example, I do do this, but I do it when I switch into, like, a vision that the characters are experiencing from a spirit. Then I switch into present tense and put it into italics in order to jar the reader, to take them into that vision, right? But this just looks like the introduction is in present tense, and then the next paragraphs are in past.

Yeah, yeah. But just to finish up, and I know we've hounded on present tense, but just from a business standpoint, remember, most people who read third person—and I've got to say it's got to be at least 30, 40, 50%—are just not going to read present-tense third person. It doesn't even matter what your story is, what it's about, how well your writing is, or anything like that. But even if it was only 10%, why would you want to start a small business where 10% of everybody who considers buying your product doesn’t because you put it in a packaging, you know? You decided to, I don’t know, make your packaging out of human feces, and everyone's like, yeah, I don't want to buy something that is wrapped in that. Yeah, just from a business standpoint, it doesn’t make any sense to me.

Agreed. Anyway, so, um, all right, let's just skip the first paragraph then. Yeah, as an introduction, I will say it is quite a hook. Like, you know, the Henry Kissinger and the alien is quite a contrasting hook here. It's an immediate interest bearer, at least for me. Henry, in his characteristic froggish voice, said the operation was, at this point, bungled. That's the word for it—bungled. The alien nodded its conic head in response and poured some of the brandy into its digestive orifice.

Okay, I'm just going to pause briefly here and say that we ideally need a line break. So the line break or the paragraph break is because Henry is speaking, and it's his paragraph. The alien’s reaction should be its own paragraph in order to give the dialogue flow. Yeah, a paragraph structure is one character's moment of time in the story, and so, since Henry is doing or saying something and then the alien is doing something, the alien should get its own paragraph to keep those separate for the reader. It is important so that they're not confused. It's just a visual clue to help them flow right through the story.

Yeah, and it just helps to kind of separate out the dialogue and let the dialogue stand out. I laughed because I do like this. I like that he doesn’t call it a mouth. I like that he calls it a digestive orifice in this setup because, you know...

So the problem—I don’t—I’m going to push back on that because I didn’t like “digestive orifice.” It’s not descriptive in any way, shape, or form. I don’t know what you’re trying to get me to paint. It is obviously there because you’re trying to be different without any value to the story. I don’t—I can’t see what this thing looks like, so it’s a gimmick. It’s an obvious gimmick, and I just think that when you do stuff like that, it just shows that you’re not strong enough as a writer to give me something.

So, I hear you, but in my head, the digestive orifice became an ass on top of a cone, which is very funny.

I mean, to me, it was just a mouth. Okay, so yeah, um, I guess because of the ridiculousness, the farcical nature of the situation being created here, right? For me, it read like a foral description. Right, but I mean, all I see is... I just see it drinking, and so that makes me go, wow, you're trying too hard, dude or girl, whatever. I’m assuming this is a dude writing this, so instead of impacting me in a positive way, that description... you know, if you actually visually describe it... you know, the alien nodded its conic head in response and poured some of the brandy in between the cheeks of its digestive orifice, right? Or that it used for a mouth even, or something. Or, you know, if you give me Henry’s reaction to the disgustingness of what the thing is doing, then it has an impact on me.

Yeah, and it's not a mouth because right now, the only thing in this sentence, the only thing I'm gonna see, is a mouth. I'm literally gonna see a gray alien, and, I mean, that's 100%, and that is why these things are kind of subjective and so on, because, like I said, for me, the farcical nature of it tickled me, right?

Yeah, all right. A whistling sound arose, crescendoed, and terminated in a thunderous blast as another shell struck the roof of the palace. I don't like that sentence, but let me read the next one, and then we can come back to it. The ground shook from the explosion, and a wave of pulverized glass swelled over the courtyard, washing imperceptibly over Henry and the alien.

Okay, so the reason why I don't like this sentence or the next one is because you are, in my opinion, hiding the cool with the way... like, a whistling sound arose, crescendoed, and terminated, but there's more than just a whistle going on here, right? This is an incoming shell, so there's a whis... with a whistling sound, you know, a shell blasted across the air—paint more of the picture.

Well, also, and again, this is just... it's probably because of the digestive orifice, this is an author that I am going to feel... I'm not saying they're actually doing this, but because of the word choices that they're using, it makes me feel that this is somebody who feels that prose should be big words. And it doesn't, and usually, what happens when I run into a writer like this is they start using big words just for the size of them.

So, like on 15, washing imperceptibly over Henry and the alien... washing slightly over Henry and the alien—that's what imperceptibly means, you know, so slight as not to be perceived. It's like, what? Okay, now, if it means that they have some type of shield around them and it's splitting around them, then show me that. But washing so slight that it was not even perceived over him and the alien, then it's not actually doing anything to them.

And that was kind of what I was getting at because, like, that imperceptibly, in my mind, I assumed that it meant that they are not affected by a wave of glass ricocheting over them and a missile strike. Like, that's cool—show me the cool! That's what I'm saying—the word doesn't convey the image.

Yeah, and so it makes me feel like the writer is going, "Oh, big word, big word." But when you start just choosing words based on their size, they might not have the meaning that you're trying to convey to the author. It is an -ly adverb, and we've talked extensively about that, and that's exactly what this is. This is one of my three rules for not using an -ly adverb. Imperceptibly is there because washing is not the correct verb—it's too strong, so we're going to use this -ly adverb to weaken that verb because we used too heavy of a verb to describe what it is actually doing. It's sort of the same thing with swelled. Swelled on 15, the first word... this one at least has the connotation, the meaning of what you're doing, but because it's used in a way that we don't normally think about it, it has no impact on me.

So verb choices are very, very important to me. They're the most important word in every sentence, and so when you start... again, it just makes me wary with it. I just... orus and then all of these—the crescendo and thunderous and all these adjectives that are being used in here and adverbs—it just makes me go, this writer is trying to write above themselves. So there's actually someone in our peanut gallery who is very well-educated and knows an amazing assortment of large words and uses them in her writing, but she's not trying hard. Like, it's literally her writing style, and while I do think it's a little much, and we talk about it because she's in my critique group, um, it still all fits. She's not trying too hard. She's not pulling words out of a thesaurus that she doesn’t understand the meanings of and everything else like that.

Um, yeah, so there's nothing wrong. I've never said these words to her, and she has way more big words in her stuff than what we see on this page. But these—some that are used a little bit incorrectly, some that are used in ways that we wouldn't normally use them—it just feels to me like this writer doesn't really understand the words they're using. They're just using them for the effect of, "Look at me, I'm using big words in my prose." And again, I could be completely wrong. I'm not trying to be mean here. I'm not trying to attack this writer. It's because I've seen this often, and the reason why I'm saying this is not to attack this writer, it's to let them know it's okay in prose to use words that are more simple. Just make sure the reader sees the visual that you're trying to get them to see, and they will enjoy the story more than being overwhelmed by your, you know, robust verbiage. That's all I'm saying. It's not an attack on the author; it's to give them permission that you don't have to write with big words. You don't have to push yourself when it's not in your normal vocabulary.

I just want to briefly deviate from the, um, from the story because, um, uh, you've now reminded me of an unpublished work I once read. Somebody had told the author that you shouldn't use "said" so much; you know, you should basically try and cut down your speech tags. But the author took that to mean you literally shouldn't say "said," so every line of dialogue had a speech tag, but they were every other possible word for "said." Like, in the thesaurus, if you look up all the other possible words for "said," they were... it was "declaimed," "orated," you know. It was just—I think I'm sure there was a "quavered" in there somewhere.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is... I mean, this is a sidetrack, but this is good for people to hear. Look, as you learn these rules—because this happens to me all the time in group—you know, inevitably, once we get into show versus tell and we get to that stage with a writer, it'll be one of the very first times that they ever hear the term of "wases are bad." And so then they'll go through, and they'll literally—and I don't know why they do this—but the first time they'll do it is they'll just go through and delete their "wases." Then the sentences don't work because you just broke a sentence. You took out a "was" and didn't do anything to the sentence; you just removed the "was." And they'll bring it to group, and it's like, okay, look, you can't write... you know, jibbly garble stuff. You have to understand it still needs a verb. You can't verb.

And so, it's that, and then, you know, you try to explain that "wases" are red flags, and then they come back, and they've rewritten the sentences in a way, but they still have... like, "I'm just never gonna use the word 'was.'" It's like, no, use the word "was." "Was" is a very important word in the English language. You need it. You can't write a story without it. It just—the amount of linguistic gymnastics that you have to go through to make sure you write a manuscript that never has the word "was" in it does not help the story in any way, shape, or form. It actually hurts it.

It's the same thing with a speech tag. It's the same thing. When we point these things out, what we're saying is, like, I just talked about the -ly adverb. I never say don't use -ly adverbs. There's three ways that you should really avoid using -ly adverbs. One of them we talked about here: you're using an -ly adverb because you used the wrong verb. So don't use that verb. Choose a better verb—either a weaker verb in this case or a stronger verb in most cases. That's what we're talking about here. It's not about all or nothing. And it really does go back to the same thing with the way I feel. And again, I could be completely wrong on this author. This literally could be how they talk and how they write and everything like that, and that's fine. But again—and we've said this many times on this podcast—it doesn't matter what you think your writing does. You are not the arbiter of whether your writing does what it's supposed to do or not. The only thing that matters is how it affects the readers, and it is subjective. So that's why we're looking for eight out of ten. Right now, it's just me and Marie. There's two of us, so 50% of the readers of this feel that the writer's trying too hard and doesn't really grasp the words that they're using.

I don't know if you haven't said one way or the other, but we know that. I don't yet. Um, I'm—I'm still kind of on board, but that's because, like, you know, like, I—I've got a take on sacral, sacral writing, and I feel like this is sacral. And I've... yeah, but this is my take: the big words are kind of part of the farcical nature, so I'm willing to give him le... give the author... I also don't know if it's a him, or I can't remember who sent it. Um, right, so I'm willing to give them leeway, you know, to see if the big words are part of kind of the farcical nature of the thing.

So, I hear you. Yeah, let me tell a story, since I'm a storyteller. So one of the first agents I ever befriended—and I befriended him because I didn't write in his genre, um, and so there was no way he could reject me ever, because I could never submit to him, because he didn't offer, you know, wasn't representing me—yeah, and we were out to dinner. And this is early... I mean, I think I had only been a fresh writer. I think it was my first year of being a professional writer, maybe my second, but literally just a baby in this industry. And there's something that agents and publishers would say that just always infuriated me back then. And so I brought it up to him, and I said, how is it that you guys can say that you can read one sentence or one paragraph and know whether to reject that thing or not? And he goes, because it's all I need. He's like, that's it. He's like—and I was like, there's no way. There's no way you can read a paragraph and know what type of writer that writer is.

And now, flash forward 20 years in my career, and it's like, oh yeah, no, if you know what you're doing, you need one paragraph, because they don't change. You know, this one did—they did write an opening paragraph that was different from the next paragraph, but that is not the way it normally is. And also, it's very wrong, um, which we've already talked about. So normally, with getting down to these, you know, just these first two paragraphs—or three, since we made the first paragraph into two, because we're skipping that first first paragraph. By the way, these words are already coming out. I'm pretty convinced that this is the way it's going to be through the whole thing. And since, as a reader, this is not my thing 100%, like, I'm not... I'm not... like, that's why I say, for me, I think that the big words might be part of the farcical nature, and it might be part of the effect the author's going for. And at the moment, it's amusing me, so it's amusing me enough to keep going, which, you know, is... I mean, that's—that's enough. That's enough for 50% of your audience. Now, you don't want a 50% hit rate. What you want to do is, you want to see if more people feel like Drake or more people feel like Marie.

Well, and also, we need to feel... see what Marie feels like on line 30. Yes, because we're very early in the process, right? Kissinger looked to the alien. "Yes, quite bungled," he croaked. Okay, you do not need the "he croaked." We already know what his voice sounds like, and it's clear who is speaking. The two started through the square in the direction of the palace. The alien's wiry legs took wide strides, as the former U.S. Secretary of State, slow on his century-old feet, hobbled alongside it. No, this tossed me out, because it's 1973 Kissinger that's... say so, right there—1973. In 1973, Kissinger was not 100 years old. I am—I am almost certain, and even if I'm not, the fact that you threw me out to go to Google to look for it is throwing me out of the story.

Um, he's exactly 50 in 1973. He was born in '23. Yeah, yeah, I thought so. May 27, because that was actually around the time when he was U.S. Secretary of—I can't remember when he was U.S. Secretary. Um, Henry Kissinger... he was in office from '73 to '77 as U.S. Secretary of State. So now I'm thrown out. Yeah, and—and here's the thing: I'm thrown out because you gave me a definitive piece of information on line three. We are in 1973. Actually, he's not even Secretary of State then. Oh, wait—wait... no, I get it. I understand what the author's doing. Okay, I get it, but this needs to be way more clear.

Okay, oh, are we... are we, like, time traveling? Yes. Yes, Henry and his alien buddy are in the future, walking in the past. Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, okay, so... okay, this is a nice device. I approve of the framing device. Yeah, okay, because it makes the whole pulverized thing, and it makes everything make more sense, but you need to make that more clear than a switch in tense. Yeah, we actually had this discussion last night in group, where the author lost the reader. They were—what they were doing was really cool, but because we didn't understand where they were going... and this goes to that, you know, head book and paper book that I'm always talking about. In the author's head book, they understand, but because they didn't set the groundwork for us to understand this—and now it makes sense, the, um, you know, washing imperceptibly over them, and in a second, we're going to see bullets pass through them as they're going—but I think we need just a touch more. So, so the big problem is, you give me a definitive piece of information on line three, then in line eight, where we do the switch, there is nothing to indicate the switch other than a tense shift.

Yeah, that is not enough for me as the reader to make the switch and understand. Yeah, right, and because it's not enough, it feels like it's just a mistake in tense shift, and then it feels really weird because now we're a century old, and I'm like, no, we're not, because I'm still stuck on the piece of information you gave me on line three. Yep, so you're making me feel... either you're making me feel like an idiot because I apparently wasn't smart enough to pick up what your framing device was just on a tense shift, and, you know, I'm not an idiot. So, um, and so that's—that's the one thing. And the other thing is you're making me feel like you lied to me. Yeah, and you don't want to do that.

Yeah, so I get it, you know, now that we understand what this is doing. There is a fine line between holding information from the reader because the payoff is cool versus pissing the reader off so that they put your book down and then they never get to the payoff. Yeah, and so I can see that this author is going, no, no, no, no, but just trust me, and when you trust me long enough, you'll get this payoff that you'll think is really cool. The problem is, this is the opening of your book. I don't trust you yet. At least, that's what we're assuming. We're assuming this is chapter one. Was there anything that said differently? No, as far as I know, this is chapter one.

Okay, so if this was chapter seven and I'm six chapters into this book, and I love it, and I love the characters, and I love everything, and you do something like this, I'm gonna be weirded out, but I'm not going to put the story down because you've earned my trust. You've earned the fact that, you know, I like where this story is going. And so, since you've lost me here, I'm gonna be like, you know what, okay, all right, it's cool, it's cool, I'm gonna... I don't really—oh, look at that payoff! Because I'm going to give you that time to get there.

If this is the opening of your book, so many of your readers—your potential audience, your potential customers—are gonna get one page into this. Because, again, books are only bought in a couple of ways, for the most part: recommendations, yeah, or the look inside, or reviews. Like, those are the three things that are the vast majority of why people buy books. And so, if I'm reading the look inside on this, I'm not getting past this. You know, it's just not gonna happen, even if it didn't have the stuff that bothered me personally with the fact that I feel the writer is working too hard outside of their comfort zone as a... as a linguistic, you know, as a linguist.

So there is a fine line in that you have to... you do have to tread that, you know. Just because you have the idea as the writer, "Oh, but it's going to be so cool with this payoff once they get there," you still have to balance that with, "But I don't want to lose my readers before they get to the payoff." Yeah, and so that's what we're saying here. We're saying here that we need just a little bit more or think about not starting it this way. Start me in the story, ground me in it first before we do a trick like this so that then you've earned a little bit of loyalty from me. And I'm gonna... I'm gonna go with you because I'm going to feel like, yeah, I'm going to get that payoff.

Yeah, and, yeah, so... so, like, I'm okay with this as the start, but here, where you do the switch, where you're switching into, like, the... what is the actual story. Or here, actually on line five, because this is the problem, right? This is still in present tense. So this still appears to be in 1973. Then here, we switch to past tense, so you don't have consistency going on here. Ideally, if you really want to just do it with a tense shift, then this line needs to be in the past tense, not the present, because this is them interacting with a scene that they're experiencing that is in the past through a hologram or through a whatever.

Exactly, exactly. Okay, let me go back to our century-old feet, which was apparently a century old last year. So, the two started through the square in the direction of the palace. The alien's wiry legs took wide strides as the former U.S. Secretary of State, slow on his century-old feet, hobbled alongside it. Bullets phased through the two and whistled across the open terrace on the left side of the courtyard. With their assault rifles perched on tree limbs and trash cans, a group of loyalists to the Chilean Socialist Party loosed a volley of bullets at the soldiers of the Chilean military stationed opposite them.

Yo, this paragraph never ends. The soldiers likewise found cover behind crumbling bricks, fountains, and statues. Then a brief pause... a pause overtook the battlefield, with the socialists hiding to reload their weapons. The momentary silence was broken as the soldiers returned a heavy downpour of gunfire at the loyalists. And again, they took turns like a deadly game of pickleball, thought the detached Kissinger. Kissinger, recalling he had a game tomorrow afternoon on century-old feet... pickleball was more active than that.

Okay, one of my biggest problems with this paragraph is that it literally never ends. Yeah, not literally, but literally. There's also—until the end, we don't have any personal connection. The only thing I would want to talk about is 25. We don't need the word "then" there, because then I wrote another sentence that you're going to read. So just a brief—yeah, of course, it happened then, because it's the next sentence. Yep, you don't need to direct me to read the next sentence when I'm going to read the next sentence next. I'm not going to jump down and read "a brief pause overtook the battlefield" and then go back to the beginning of the paragraph and read a sentence there, and then skip to the end and read a sentence, and come back to the middle of the paragraph and read a sentence. I'm going to read that sentence next because it's the next sentence. You don't have to tell me "then this happened," because I'm already there.

You never—like, not never never—but you never need "then," or "began," or "after," or "next." You don't. Next, you don't need those. I promise you, you don't need them. The way the English lan—the English language is a sentence structure language. Things happen one after the other. You don't need the "then" and the "next" and the whatever. So, yep. And you definitely don't need "began," and man, the amount of "begans" that I read... and the worst is, like, most of them don't even get interrupted. It's just like, "and then she began," and I'm like, you literally don't need anything in here except "she."

Look at the very first sentence of this paragraph: "The two started." You don't need that. They just walked. Yeah, "the two walked across" or "through the square," whatever you want to say. Yeah, because they're actively doing it. They didn't start and then interrupt; they just are doing it. Yeah, they are busy doing it. You don't need to say that they were—they weren't interrupted. Clearly, they walked straight through the bullets, which is cool, you know?

Yeah, for any of those things—for like the "started," the "began," and all of that—the only time I do them is, like, you know, "Marie started to turn, but Drake grabbed her arm." Yeah, because she didn't finish; she didn't turn. So if I wrote "Marie turned, but Drake grabbed her arm," that's gonna be really weird because I've already painted her turning. But if I paint "Marie began to turn, but Drake grabbed her arm," then I'm going to, in my mind, I'm starting the turn, and then the next moment, I'm going to interrupt that. I would probably, there, make a strong case for using "was" rather than "began" and say, "Marie was turning when Drake grabbed her arm." I'm trying to give an example of when it is appropriate.

100%, I would just say that that, to me, is a—is a very great case to use "was," since we spoke about "was" earlier. Because it—that "was" indicates that the action is happening right now, and then the interruption feels very natural. Yeah, yeah, depends on sentence structure. Um, yeah. Yeah, but yeah, so that, you know, that—that's a good place to use "was."

Okay, uh, anything else on this paragraph, except please break it up and give us some more interaction with the characters so that it matters to the—like, how—how is Kissinger feeling about what they're seeing? Yes, like, how—how... how often have bullets phased through him? You know, how—yeah, what does it feel like? Because even if he can't physically feel it, maybe he can feel the ghost of it, his body makes up that he feels it. Um, you know, they tickled as they went through him, even though he knew that it was just a hologram and he wasn't actually feeling anything.

Yeah, so it would be interesting. Oh yeah, it would be interesting to know what that felt like. And how did Kissinger feel about, like, the Chilean Socialist Party? As I remember, he was a fairly militant anti-communist. Uh, so I think—I don't remember. We also don't need "Chilean" twice. The second one could just be "the military," and it doesn't need to be capitalized. Yeah, even if you left "Chilean," "military" doesn't need to be a capital T.

Yeah, and, yeah, break it up. Uh, probably here would be a good place for a paragraph break, at the very least. Yeah, and if you bring in Kissinger's feelings, that gives you the ability to break it up as well. Yeah, you could bring in Kissinger's feelings over here with the bullets and then have, like, the left side... you know, have Kissinger glare at the socialists, um, and that kind of thing.

I will say that there are no big words through this entire long paragraph. Yeah, okay. Um, the bungling really began with a failed kidnapping of General Schneider, Henry recalled, speaking over the rapid staccato of bullets. He acted irrationally. We offered him money to denounce Allende. We sent agents to explain the operation. Mind you, this was us putting our cards on the table, exposing the whole plan. I—we tried to make him understand the benefit for the Chilean people in dropping the silly socialist experiment the rabble had voted for and availing the many rewards of allyship with the United States. Schneider was even guaranteed a cushy position under the reordered regime, but nevertheless, he resisted. He scoffed, in a rare display of idealism, and what did it earn him?

Okay, um, so this author is in love with long paragraphs. Yeah, this is too much exposition. Yes, it's too much exposition with too little—like, this absolutely, I can hear this coming out of Kissinger's mouth, right, because, as I say, like, my memory is that he was very anti-communist. Mhm. But it's not important to me as the reader because I don't understand what's going on. The opening was cool for me. Okay, like, I enjoyed the thought of Kissinger with an alien. I enjoyed the thought of them walking into, like, a past thing, which clearly, you know, Kissinger had been involved in causing or whatever in the—in the setup of this world. Like, that's the premise going on here, which I enjoyed as a premise. But now you're info-dumping on me.

Yes, before telling me what the current-day plot is. I can go read this on the internet for myself about what happened in Chile in 1973. It's also written like an encyclopedia. Yes. So instead, if we wanted to do some personality here, even if we kept the first line, "The bungling really began with the failed kidnapping of General Schneider," yeah, Henry recalled, speaking over the rapid staccato of bullets, "he was an irrational fool. I mean, he should have taken the money." Yeah, and if you make it personal like that, and then—and then what is the alien doing during this? Does the alien, like, you know, nod his cone head in agreement? That breaks that paragraph up.

And then again, most of this stuff can be skipped, you know—the whole "we offered him money, we sent agents, putting cards on the table, exposing plans, make him understand the Chilean people, the socialist experiment"—none of that is even needed. Like, I would cut every single bit of that. I'm very certain we don't need all of that right now to understand why Kissinger and an alien are walking through a redo of the past. Yep, you know, um, this is just a history lesson. It's literally just a history lesson, and it's not interestingly written. No.

Um, and what is the alien doing? Right? The alien has disappeared. Yeah. And how does Kissinger feel about what he's saying? Yeah, you know, and—and why are we here? Why is Kissinger here with this alien, walking through this location?

Like—well, since you brought that up—so I just did the latest Writer Room Workshop. We did scene openings, and I pushed them with, remember, there are four things you must do at the beginning of every scene: whose head am I in, where am I at, why am I here, and what is the hook—something that's going to be cool that makes me want to continue reading. Now that we figured out that it's either a hologram or time travel or whatever—we don't know what it is yet—we don't need to know what it is yet. Yeah, just know that they're watching a rerun, a live-action rerun of the event. That is a cool hook. Great. Yeah, whose head am I in? We're in omniscient, which is not my favorite to be in, but whatever, we're in omniscient. Where am I at? I'm at this battlefield. Great. Three of the four check marks have been checked, but I have no idea why I'm here. I have no motivation, and because I have no motivation, I have... yes, I don't have a burning need to continue reading.

The "why I'm here" is so important because if the reader doesn't understand what is important about me being in this moment of this story, they lose interest. Yeah, they fade, and they move on. Yeah. And so again, you know, I said earlier, you as the writer do not get to choose whether you've done your job or not. Readers do. That's why you have to be critiqued by other people, especially other people who don't know you, don't care about you, aren't here to save your feelings.

I know everyone thinks that, oh no no, my partner, my brother, my best friend, they are really, really, really rough on me. No, they're not. They're as rough on you as they know you can take. Yeah, and they do not go beyond that. So the—we don't know why, and since we don't know why, especially when you hit us with this long history lesson, that, you know, is just going to make my eyes gloss over, I'm not excited to read. You know, there are two reasons—there are two ways—that you can get a reader to read the next paragraph of your story: one, because they have to, because it's the next paragraph of the story; there's, you know, if they're going to read the story, they have to read it. Or two, because the last paragraph forces them to read it. They couldn't choose not to read it if they wanted to. At any time, I can choose not to read the next paragraph in this story. Literally, there hasn't been a single moment where I'm like, oh my goodness, I cannot wait to read that next paragraph. Yeah. Like, and then, when you have these long paragraphs that are massive amounts of exposition, it just continues to sap the will out of me to continue on. And, and, and again, this is subjective. I'm not saying that I'm right. There could be tons of people that read this, that love it, that want to keep reading, and there's nothing wrong with that. I never want stories to fail. I always hope stories can find an audience, and there's an audience for every story out there.

So I will just also say there are—like, so your problem is there are going to be two kinds of readers who hit this, this, this paragraph, this information dump, and both of them are going to stop reading. There's going to be readers who know nothing about history, and this is going to read like a textbook paragraph from their history textbook, and they're going to stop reading because if they wanted to consume history the way it's written, they would have read that already in their textbook and they would know this. And the other type of reader you're going to read is going to be readers who are massively interested in history, and they're going to stop reading because it reads like a textbook, which they have already read and know. There is no personal touch here. There are none of Kissinger's feelings here.

Yeah, so if you're going to do an info dump, make sure you make the—especially in dialogue—make sure that you make the info dump relevant to the character through whom you are doing the info. I don't see any motivation. I just scanned through here on the next page at all. Yeah, so I think, I think we can call it here. So you need—this piece needs motivation. This piece desperately needs Kissinger's motivation, story motivation, for why the reader is consuming this.

Yeah, now I want to say—I do want to say something nice. Not because I feel like I need to say something nice, but I actually—there is something nice to say. Because, again, I'm not the—I'm not the cheerleader kind of person. However, looking through there, because I was also looking through as you're reading through, it does look like the reader—or the writer—is not doing the forced big words anymore. So I'm going to assume that they edited the top outside of their range because they felt like, oh, this is what prose people do, and this is more in their normal writing voice. And this is—there's none of that in here. There was none of it that I saw that I read as you were kind of flipping through. So there is none of that egregiousness. So that's—that's actually a really good thing.

And also, for the most part, other than, you know, there's some bigger paragraphs than they should be, but that can be fixed with, you know, the pro—the main problem, which is adding in more personal personality and motivation and all of that to give us why we're here. The writing is solid. Like, they—they—they do have a good grasp of sentence structure for the most part. They're not tense-shifting outside of that first paragraph, but I think they did that on purpose. I don't think that was a typo. It was a bad choice, in my opinion and in your opinion, but it was done, you know, on purpose. Yeah, so that's good.

Anytime a writer does something that I feel is wrong but they've done it intentionally, I love that because it means you thought about it. It's when you make those intentional tense shifts, and you're like, oh, I didn't even know there's such a thing as tense, like, yeah, it's obvious because you're all over the board. So I say there's very few, like, grammatical issues. Like, there's a couple of punctuation things, like this—this over here should be a full stop. But that is such nitpicky grammar; most readers will read straight over that. Yes, without blinking. You know, yeah.

So they do have a—you got another one down on 38 that should have a full stop. Very solid prose, or, you know, sentence structure and grasp of paragraph structure. And again, they're too long because of the fact that you don't have—it's not that the—if you break up these longer paragraphs written as is, you're just breaking them up. They don’t have to be based off of paragraph structure, except for, like, that first one that we did because we went into the alien. But they are too long, and it's because we're not—you're missing elements of the story that we would like to see.

But on the good note, this—this writer does have—especially once we get down here, and they've gotten away from trying to overreach in their linguistic abilities. And, and it's—that's not even a dig on the writer. Let's say the writer's actual linguistic abilities are more like the top part. That doesn’t matter; the reader doesn’t want to read that. Gone are the days—you know, back in the 1800s, writers did want to prove to readers that they were smarter than them, and readers liked to actually go through and look words up that they had never seen. You know, we didn’t have the amount of information that we have now, so it was very common for somebody to keep a dictionary next to them as they were reading fiction books. And they really enjoyed hitting that word that they had never seen before and going and learning that word.

We now live in an information age. We are consuming words constantly. Our languages are way more robust than they ever have been. The average adult speaks more different words today than they did a hundred years ago, 150 years ago. So we aren't looking for education of words in our fiction literature; we're looking for entertainment. And so even if the author's normal linguistic ticks are like above and this is them toning themselves down, this is still way—remember, we want to write fiction for adults at a fourth-grade reading level. That's not an insult; that's where we want to be to have the most impact, so that they are... they can paint the picture that we're painting on their brain flawlessly and enjoy the story without having to go out and get a dictionary to figure things out.

Now, I will say that in Sangwheel I do take to use, uh, bigger and older words, but that's also because it's part of my flavoring choice, right, for that world. And I use archaic words as well. Yeah, but that's a fantasy kind of thing. So, it's funny, um, actually, one of the people in the peanut gallery just sent me some edits, and I haven't gone through them, but I did notice they popped one of my more archaic words because it is—but they—but this person isn't a fantasy reader. Yeah, not that fantasy readers might hit that archaic word and not stumble too. So I'm going to look at it because I look at everything that anyone points out to me. Yeah, and I may change it, but I used it because I, you know, for a reason. So it just kind of depends. I'll have to go in and look at it, and I don't even remember which one it was. I just remembered, uh, seeing it when I was kind of glancing through her notes.

Yeah, so my biggest problem—so, so I did actually really enjoy the concept of Kissinger with the alien. I thought the framing device with a—with a setup was cool, like all of that was cool. Where I lost the will to continue was when we got here, and it was just a massive historical info dump, and I don't know why we're here. Right, like the coolness factor of Kissinger and an alien carried me all the way to here, and this is where it ran out of steam. This is—this is kind of where it was just... So by here, I need to know what we're doing here so that it tempts me to keep reading.

Yeah, yeah, the motivation is so important. Why? Why am I here? Why is this an important thing for me to read? And, and it's not—and I should expand upon that. It's not "why is this important for me to read" as in, oh, but you need the information about this. It's "why for the story, why do I need this information?" And the answer to that cannot be, oh, you'll find out later. Yeah, like, no. I need to know why Kissinger is here now, like what the story for me to be... for me to understand this story, why do I need this information? Which means I have to know something about something. And again, the answer can't be, yeah, but you do find out in chapter three. Like, I know I won't, because I'll never get to chapter three. Yeah, I need to know here.

So is Kissinger justifying himself to the alien? Is he defending himself? Is he defending Earth? What is he doing here? Yeah, that's what I need. So, yeah, I think that is a good place to end this episode, and we will see you soon for another one.

Bye! Thank you for tuning in. This is Marie Meany, your co-host on this literary adventure. Our goal is to provide you with valuable insights and discussions on writing. If you believe in our mission, please like and subscribe to our podcast. Sharing our episodes with your community not only helps us grow but also contributes to a richer, more diverse conversation about storytelling. We appreciate your support!

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