Ink In Your Veins
Early in the year, I had the chance to talk with international best-selling author, Rachael Herron, on her podcast, Ink In Your Veins.
In addition to writing romance novels and thrillers and memoirs, Rachael also teaches writing through her 90 Days to Done and 90 Days to Revision courses. I enrolled in one of her 90 Days to Done courses as a way of restarting a stalled project and enjoyed her energy and her take on how to get your writing done.
In our conversation, we talked about editing, about the difference between developmental editing and copy editing and proofreading, and which kind of editing is really necessary. I’ve been thinking about that question since, and I don’t feel any more certain that there’s a definitive answer, but it’s interesting to hear Rachael’s thoughts about it.
We also talked about story structure and all of the tricky ways we can think that we are manipulating it. Like when we start the story at the end and then go back to fill in the gaps. The thing I pointed out that Rachael hadn’t considered is that the thing we structure isn’t really the story, it’s the reader’s experience of the story. And the reader’s experience always has a beginning, a middle and an end, in that order. Whatever we do with the revealing of the story, there are a few consistent things about the reader’s experience that tend to leave them satisfied, and as long as we work toward that, we can do whatever we want with the story itself.
I enjoyed this conversation, and am happy to have Rachael in my writing network.