IT'S NEVER TOO LATE, OLD DOG

I've had 11 years of editing and/or publishing literary magazines and microzines. I've had the yeah or nay over the works of some very fine writers in my time, yet I've s

Our microzine. This issue on orange paper.

till managed to learn a thing or two from my recent attendance at two writer groups. As you know, I recently translated a novel from mss to editable files. My goal, of course, is to entirely rewrite the novel, Delinquent Lives, and put it on Amazon as an ebook...if I don't land an agent.

When the Coffee House Writers Group [chwg] looked at the novel, several readers were bothered by a lack of clarity in the way I switched between the points of view of two characters which, actually, continues throughout the entire work. At first, I was too enamored at the clever way I was integrating the personalities of the two characters whose points of view dominate the novel, but I took my reader's advisement under consideration, and this morning I rewrote several sections to clarify the characters in relation to one another, and I'm damned happy with the result.

In the other group, SW WA/OR Write To Publish, they live by a silly rule about using the word "it". Can cost a man a quarter if he uses "it". I always think of bringing the opening of The Sound and The Fury to such a class and presenting it as my own work just to see how the rule makers would deal with Faulkner's writing. However, this morning as I sat down to my writing and began to look at the "it"s liberally sprinkled throughout my text, I began to eliminate some of them and to find other ways of expressing the pronouns. Imagine my pleasure to find I liked the changes. The changes added clarity and precision to the novel.I'll continue in that way from now on.

So...as you see, even a 75 year old writer with much experience can learn if he listens.