Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Art of Reading

The Art of Reading

I love art… I build cars, models and write. There is an analogy between the three. I won’t try and bring in cars in today’s blog but I will talk about acquiring models and reading.

There are three ways to come up with a model figurine… or any model for that matter (Right now I am into figurines). You can (1) buy one at the jewelry store or find one somewhere in an antique store, yard sale or second hand store (2) buy a kit and make it or (3) scratch build it. As with the model above the degree of difficulty goes up with the approach.

In yesterday’s blog I mentioned that I suggested outlining a novel written by one of your favorite authors. No, not the whole thing….That will no doubt prove unnecessary. I say this because the writer’s Modus Operand will soon begin to emerge after several chapters. Further that if you have taken the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW) you will by now have a working outline of a novel you intend to write. The idea is to take the structure and story line of the EWW and plug it into the Outline of the chapter written by your favorite author.

Now wait before you start becoming indignant. I am not suggesting you write a similar story or that you try and emulate the voice and technique of a favorite writer. I am talking about using the structure and componentry and loosely fitting in the story line of what you are writing. To me this would be worth doing if as nothing more than an exercise to stimulate your professional development. From a conceptual standpoint this would seem very useful indeed but taking it from concept to execution is another matter altogether.

What I am suggesting is like writing a review template. Something to lay over your story outline to make sure you include all the stuff evidenced by your favorite author and one of His/her favorite pieces of work.

When I started mine on Game of Thrones (GOT) I wrote it like a vignette just to see where it was leading… I wanted to determine how the geographical diversity of the story was integrated but also the componentry of the writing. For example how were the back-story, exposition, dialogue and things like foreshadowing being set up? Like in a review template I wrote these down but soon settled on using these as subsets of a chapter’s scenes.

I will be keeping you posted on how this exercise is going and if anyone wants to try it and provide some independent feedback I would be interested in hearing it.