Writing: Oomph!

[sartorias]

Yesterday in another portion of cyberspace a friend was talking about putting some “oomph” into the writing, and I thought about that last night as the first of the family holiday gatherings happened (I ate! It stayed in me! Hurrah

Comments

[kalimac]

There's two things referred to here that often are connected with what I call cinematic writing: fiction writing by authors who've spent too much time watching movies and not enough time reading books.

1. "Translating everything into sight and sound" - this can become descriptions that omit the feel and smell of the characters' environment, or that employs cinematographic coyness (e.g. characters are looking at something but the author refuses to say what it is - a clever technique in a film, an annoying one in a book).

2. "Having two or three things going on at once" - this can become cinematic quick-flash cross-cutting, also a dangerous technique to use in prose. It can disorient the reader who doesn't have the advantage of film's immediate visual orientation when the scene changes.

[sartorias]

Well, translating everything into sight and sound is not a technique, it's something my brain insists on doing to memory, which is one reason why I have trouble memorizing text and can never remember names--just faces.

But you're right about the rest.

[actress4jesus]

Ooomph, I believe, is had by every person who has ever loved or ever had a passion, or, quite possibly, the strength to live. Am I right?

[sartorias]

Well, intense emotion is definitely right up there in personal experience, but the issue here is how to get that same intensity into our fiction?

This is one possible technique.

[actress4jesus]

Capturing it when you experience it and pouring it out over paper?

[sartorias]

Well, for some writers it feels they are doing so, but then coming back later after the intensity of creation diminishes, they reread it and discover that the words are godawful purple prose, veined with cliches, grammar ouches, repeated phrases that were already stale, etc.

That is where the real work comes in, for those of us who are not poets. Word by word, line by line, polishing--discarding the bad stuff and working for the right word, the right verb, the right cadence, tone, etc, to recapture the passion and this time make sure the words on paper do their job of reflecting the passion back to the reader.

oomph!

[skyeb]

I think that sub-text can provide a lot of oomph, more than all that surface chaos--the unspoken, underlying misunderstanding, or misdirection, that can build explosive tension.
~Skye

Re: oomph!

[sartorias]

Excellent point.