Yup! That's where the sun generally is.
Sheriff Woody likes to go places with me. He’s fond of looking at big Alberta skies. Really, who isn’t? Here he is, contemplating the Camrose sky from our room at the swanky casino hotel the day before I headed a day-long editing workshop at the library there.
I’m not a gambler. I see the allure, but it would never be a problem for me. Occasionally, though, I find myself in a casino. I was in EVERY CASINO when my sister, my brother, and I took my mom on a surprise trip to Vegas a couple of years back. My husband and I spent some time at a casino outside Edmonton last new year’s eve, where we were seeing a Paul McCartney tribute band. And the Camrose casino has the best buffalo chicken mac & cheese on the face of this or any other planet. I remembered it from years earlier.
I dropped a fiver into some faceless machine and it spit out $150 at me. Not going to argue with that.
I DIGRESS.
Woody knows his skies. He’s seen skies across this country, but I think he prefers to be near home, on the prairie or in the parkland where I live and where the sky is wide and wonderful. He’s not able to tell me any more as his voice box has crapped out, and when I pull the string on his back, he sounds like Linda Blair telling Father Damien that his mother is in there with them, and wonders if he’d like to leave a message.
Afraid my Sheriff’s talking days are over…
Always lots to look at in that sky, too. The moon, the sun (sometimes both at once), stars, clouds, Bohemian waxwing butts on the wing, the asses of Magpies.
“The sun rose at dawn.”
Yes. As is its wont. I was judging a travel writing competition some years ago and that line from one of the stories has never left me.
What does all this have to do with editing your own work? Plenty! No matter where you are on earth, the sun rises at dawn. This does not vary. Your writing can either tell me that the sun rose, OR that it was dawn. Both is overkill, and since the sun doesn’t rise at any other time of day, it’s not necessary to say it. (Even in the far north, where the sun sometimes doesn’t set at all, you can still track its progress through the day.)
Similarly, stars do a few things . They shine, they twinkle, they sparkle, and they die. That’s about it. Who knows what they get up to during the day, but they’re still out there. And they are invariably in the sky alongside the moon and the sun, whether we can see them from our location or not. They’re there. We all know they’re there. And the person we’re concerned about here (your reader) definitely knows it.
I am one of The Nylons’ most devoted fans and have been for decades. To this day, they’re my most preferred driving music. I’ve spent years learning and singing along with the harmonies, and when I’m feeling sad, they bring the joy back. They take me back to my teenage years and my early twenties, when things were… I dunno. Younger? Easier, maybe? Three of them are now gone, which causes me pain, but doesn’t stop me listening. If anything, their music is all the more precious to me.
Even they sometimes do this, though. In this song, the moon is “up in the sky”. Yes. That’s my experience of where the moon is as well. The Nylons’ stars don’t just sparkle. They “sparkle and shine”!
I recognize that the discipline of writing pop songs requires rhymes (usually) and since the song is about stars, it makes sense to have so much detail about them.
My point, though, is this. There is no new way to write about the sky or the stuff that’s in it. The saying about writing is that there is nothing new under the sun. I believe that. I also believe that nothing new can be said about the sun (unless you’re writing a post-apocalyptic thriller in which it’s burning out).
If the sun rises in your narrative (whether it’s the End Times or not), your reader knows what time it is. It’s dawn. If there are stars in your story, your reader knows where they are. They’re in the sky. Shave a few words and you won’t be telling your reader stuff about the cosmos that they absolutely know already.