The Writer's invisibility cloak

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Elmore Leonard

Now that I've written about trying to see the craft behind the writing, I may as well write about how hard writers work to hide that craft from their readers.

It's sort of contradictory, using all the tricks of the trade to make it seem effortless. My favourite contradiction is that fiction writing is usually written in the past tense. Authors spend painstaking hours creating stories full of immediacy, and place the readers right in the moment... with past tense. If you think about it, it makes no sense. Don't think about it.

"She ate the pear. It was juicy and cold."

She did? It was? When? Ages ago? Yet while reading, time folds in on itself and it seems natural. The story has already happened, but the reader is experiencing it now. Whether it's the way our brain and language works, or because we've been trained throughout our lives not to notice, past tense is now. Trying another tense takes guts, and it often reveals the wizard behind the curtain.

And that's how fiction writers spend their time: considering madness like that, and hiding from their readers. Remembering you're reading a story is remembering that it's a lie, and the best part of fiction, I think, is the truth it reveals.

I've been in the depths of editing for these last few weeks and so I'm fine-tuning a lot of bits and pieces of language, trying to make it seem like I'm not. Sometimes I go too far and then back-track to older versions, preferring my original attempt. Sometimes what I first wrote was forced as I tried to reach an idea, and it needs more help to get there.

None of it is fool-proof or I wouldn't feel so foolish trying to sort it out.