ALISSA YARBROUGH

Perfectionism is not one of my strong points. I know because I have a couple of family members to whom that overriding drive is a continual plague on their existence (at least, from my point of view).

Our society is a visually controlled one, saturated with cinema and flashy videos in order to maintain our shortening attention spans. I'm seeing the same drift in fiction, a molding of the writing to keep up with the dopamine in the action-packed movies. We are showing all right, but along the same vein, we're going overboard in describing every detail as we would see in a motion picture.

There is beauty in the arrangement of words, and while I understand in fiction you cannot bore the reader with an overabundance of descriptions and flowery phrases, there needs to be a balance between keeping the pace of the story while not altogether ditching eloquence for directness.

The processes for Trad Publishing & Self-Publishing can be confusing, but I want to share something with you that makes things a little easier.