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Separating the Colors

Some of my best writing ideas hemorrhage from my brain while I drive or when I walk—not sure how it all works—maybe the smells, the sounds, the visuals, the weather, they sort of conspire to draw me into a nirvana-like state.

So I’m headed home from a retreat recently, thinking about the critique sessions, and why the writing failed to move me. It hit me like a biff to the head—combine multiple colors in a bucket, stir them together, and they disappear in a gray mess.

Words are like colors, they have their own separateness, their own beauty, and when thoughtfully, sparingly combined they sweep readers through worlds, alive and magical, so that at the last page, this author desires you ache, even curse—there’s no more.

These are the stories we carry in our hearts.

Back to the critique. What happened? In most cases it was sensory overload—I heard the words, but they turned gray in my mind where pictures should’ve flowed.

Action interrupted for back story, either overtly in the author’s voice or as part of a character’s internal thoughts, and often unrelated to the action. Excessive descriptions, modifiers, metaphors, and similes—characters on stage with no voice, no direction.

I’m the first to say it’s not easy to carve away words, to pull back, to be spare—spare lives two doors down from bland, blancmange, junket, aspic pudding (I shudder.) But spare allows the reader to engage with the story, to fill in the blanks, to imagine, and it’s in the imagination of the reader that a story comes alive, not in the overwritten pages of a book.

Revision is the process by which the author refines and discovers the story—the peel-back of what’s unimportant—like separating colors, and finding ‘Starry Starry Night’ in a gray canvass.

May your work bring joy to others,

Shayne Huxtable

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