Still to Learn

Trephine read my ch 3 today and said that although my writing has improved, nothing happened in the chapter. My writing still lacks "stories," or points of interest. A story is supposed to be about how characters change as a result of their experience, or like my MFA book says, "Stories are about events that happen to people" (p38). My project so far has too much set up and not enough "story" to give readers interest. Too much introspection, not enough individual scenes, I guess.

Today I've been reading The Economist's Style Guide. I need to learn more grammar terms. I keep looking up stuff like subjunctive and infinitive... But this page was great:
During my many years as a reader of your newspaper, I have distilled two lessons about the use of our language. Firstly, it is usually easier to write a double negative than it is to interpret it. Secondly, unless the description of an event which is considered to be not without consequence includes a double or higher-order negative, then it cannot be disproven that the writer has neglected to eliminate other interpretations of the event which are not satisfactory in light of other possibly not unrelated events which might not have occurred at all.

Also, from George Orwell:
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?