A Conversation for Writing Right with Dmitri: Inverting the Pyramid and Other Tricks of the Trade
Blue Pencils
Florida Sailor All is well with the world Started conversation Mar 6, 2016
I am sure many of our readers are not familiar with the 'Blue
pencil' back in the olden days things written in colour blue did not print on Xerox machines and blue prints so were ideal for writing notes along the side of documents and drawings. One of the rules back then was you could not use a blue ink pen to sign a letter as it would not appear on a copy of the original document.
When I first started drawing, in the big world, we all had a blue pencil that we would use to make snide remarks and doodles on the side of the drawings. these did not print on the blue line prints that went through the office for approval. What we did not know was that our final drawings were all photographed on micro-film that included the blue lines.
After several months of drawing the first of our projects came back to the office on film and the supervisors were shocked and asked us to explain our markings on the side of the paper.
To get back to your main theme of this article I think many of us have a tendency to try to hide what we are writing about in the hope of an O'Henry style surprise ending. In the real world a good author can tell us how the story will end (or at least tell us what to expect) in the opening paragraph and then lead through the story to find out why it happened that way.
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Blue Pencils
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