Understatement

Okay, so, yesterday I wrote a whole giant batch of book and I am VERY VERY pleased about that. I'm doing all my usual things wrong, of course. Understatement is the worst. Would you have predicted that was a writing flaw of mine? Well, it is. I'm a criminal understater in third person.

I'm not entirely sure I know how to write at all in third person, though I think I've got it pretty well in first person. Blah! In third I go back and look at it later and think, "Oh, that's nice, except I left out everything important because I didn't want to bonk you over the head with it."

Must learn to bonk you over the head with it! Okay!

But I'm still extremely happy with what I wrote. You can't fix it until you do it in the first place. I mean, criminy.

Essentially everything turned out awesome and great except you have not the slightest idea what the main character is thinking or feeling about anything, or what motivates her, or what she wants or plans or is going to do.

Like I said, it's not perfect. Heh.

I was always trained that (this was some screenwriters who had left Hollywood and were teaching at a large state university, for perspective, which I have now but did not have then) you're not supposed to SAY any of that stuff. You should be able to tell everything from what they do and say.

That is wrong. I've been fighting that training ever since. Ask my patient and long-suffering readers and mentor type people. It's like Soviet bread line sparseness. See, that writing wouldn't even contain something like Soviet bread line sparseness because that's too vivid.

Basically I have to learn how to write people better, such that you know what they're all about.

Nothing BIG or anything. Ahahahahahahahahaha. I cry now.

Oh well, you can't fix it if you don't know what's wrong. It's easy enough to think of exercises for working on this. It's not that I don't know how to do it. It's that I scrupulously avoid doing it.

I was taught to put two spaces between sentences, too, and learned not to do that. I learned to type with the Dvorak keyboard. Surely I'm trainable?