Pump Up Your Writing

 

 

You’ve finished your rough draft and now it’s time to go in and pump it up with details to turn it from good to unforgettable! Yet…you pause because this task either seems overwhelming or tedious or both.

 

Take a deep breath, snuggle into your favorite writing space, and pump up your writing one detail at a time.

 

Start with your opening scene. Read it out loud. Does it hook you? Are you intrigued? If not, do you have a wow scene you could make the opening scene? Is there a wow scene you could add to hook your readers?

 

One author I go to for inspiration on opening scenes is Julie Lessman. Most of her books are free on Kindle Unlimited and her opening scenes always hook me with either intrigue or laughter. I would recommend her Love’s Silver Lining or Love at Any Cost.

 

Next, I like to read the ending of each chapter and ask, does this end with a cliff hanger that keeps me wanting more? Sometimes this is fixed by simply changing where one chapter ends and the next begins. Whatever you choose to do, make sure it keeps your reader wanting more! An author I recently read did a great job of ending each chapter with a cliff hanger. Check out Lynn H. Blackburn’s books for some inspiration!

 

After that, dig into your sensory details. I know most of you are groaning at this point and I’m with you. This is one of the most tedious parts of revising. Read each scene and put yourself in your characters shoes. What are you seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or feeling that effects your words, thoughts, and actions? This part takes a lot of time, but it brings depth to your setting, plot, and characters.

 

There is far more you can do to revise your writing, but I hope this gives you a place to start. Keep plugging away and your details with draw your readers in!

 

 

Until next time, happy and blessed writing!

Well Begun

Since the advent of its Nook e-book reader, Barnes & Noble has allowed visitors to read any e-book in its inventory for an hour at no charge while they’re in the store. In fact, one can come back every day to read the book in hour-long installments.

On my most recent visits to B&N, I paid careful attention to people in the coffee shop to see how they sampled new books on their e-readers. None of them spent a whole hour that way. In fact, most came with 3 or 4 print books under arm as well as their Nooks, then sampled all of them as they sipped a cup of Starbucks and munched their Danish. Cups emptied, they bought 1 or 2 books and left the store.

First impressions are quickly made.

When I served as a book-contest judge several years ago, I promised myself to read the first 50 pages as a courtesy, no matter how I felt about an entry. Even that small amount of reading seemed burdensome with certain books. With others, the self-imposed 50-page quota flew past in no time and I was eager to read more. You can guess which books got my vote!

Typical book browsers spend little time sampling a new novel, so the opening pages are critical. If you want to invest extra time polishing a manuscript for submission, your time will be well spent at the beginning. 

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth and daughter Heather.

Need That Definite Article?

While I was revising my first novel manuscript, my crit partners complained that its descriptive passages did not engage a reader's senses. Here was a typical passage:

Ruth slid the galvanized pail of potato peelings off the table and carried it to the backyard, where half a dozen Plymouth Rocks were scratching for worms. When she dumped the pail in their midst, the chickens cackled with delight and began tearing into the fresh vegetable skins.

My sensory cues were there all right, but their effect was lifeless. For one thing, I leaned heavily on the definite article, the. (In those 48 words I just quoted, the appears 6 times.) So I began noticing what happens when a writer does away with it.

On BBC-TV's series, "The Secret Life of Books," I heard the narrator read several passages from Laurie Lee's coming-of-age novel, Cider with Rosie, which rarely uses the.  I bought a copy from a used book store and found this was his consistent pattern. Here's how he describes the house where he grew up:

Our house, and our life in it, is something of which I still constantly dream, helplessly bidden, night after night, to return to its tranquility and nightmares; to the heavy shadows of its stone-walled rooms creviced between bank and yew trees, to its boarded ceilings and gaping mattresses, its bloodshot geranium windows, its smells of damp pepper and mushroom growths, its chaos and rule of women.

In that 66-word sentence, he uses the definite article...once! Here's how he describes their kitchen:

That kitchen, worn by our boots and lives, was scruffy, warm and low, whose fuss of furniture seemed never the same but was shuffled around each day. A black grate crackled with coal and beech twigs; towels toasted on the guard; the mantel was littered with fine old china, horse brasses and freak potatoes...

In those 53 words, he uses the definite article 3 times (half as often as I would). Instead of employing that colorless, tasteless, odorless modifer, he utilizes words that awaken our senses.

Strictly speaking, English syntax calls for the definite article on only three occasions:

• The noun you're modifying is specific. 
• The noun you're modifying is not new to the reader.
• The noun you're modifying refers to an entire class.

Look back at my manuscript sample. Using these rules, see if you eliminate at least half of my definite articles. How would you rewrite the passage in a more engaging way without them? If you find yourself overusing the (as I do), ask yourself whether you're just avoiding the use of your imagination.

Sent to the Prose Fat Farm

by Rachael Phillips

Perhaps you are one of the Ernest Hemingways of the writing world—an author whose lean, perfect prose moves over a page like a dancer in a sleek black dress. Your writing rarely has to go on a diet—it works beautifully as you’ve written it. No more. No less. Agents love it. Editors love it. The reading public loves it, because you have supplied spare, artistically written stories that satisfy, yet don’t leave them feeling stuffy and overfed. 

  

Then there are the Charles Dickens writers who love words, love them all and use them all any way they can. Dickens, for example, wrote four paragraphs at the beginning of A Christmas Carol simply to establish that Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge’s partner, was deceased. He included a 79-word side discussion as to whether a door nail is deader than a coffin nail.

I have always savored reading such paragraphs. And I love writing them. I love feeling overfed! However, the last time I attempted to slip something like that past my crit partner, she sent me to a literary fat farm, where they took away all the heavy tangents that marble my writing.

“What are you thinking! The fat is what makes it taste good,” I protested. “It gives my voice its unique flavor.”

“It kills your readers,” said my cruel trainer. “Nobody these days can digest all that.”

But that’s not all. They also denied me my favorite fluffy adjectives, claiming they smothered my nouns. The sugary ly adverbs also stole the impact of my action.

“What action?” my trainer said. “Your verbs are so flabby, they can’t stand on their own. Get them moving! Make your characters sprint, cling, shriek, crawl, fling, leap, and plop. Stop adding pounds and pounds of other words to prop them up. Is it really necessary to use ‘suddenly,’ ‘actually,’ and ‘literally’ 453 times in one manuscript?”

“I kind of like them.”

“You also used ‘kind of’ 177 times.” She glared at me, then at my manuscript again. “Once we get rid of all those, we’ll start cleaning out these extra ‘thats’—”

“Nooooh! Not my thats!” I shrieked (see, I can use an action verb when I want to).

“Too many uses of ‘the.’ You don’t need all those possessive pronouns, either.”

She says she’s trying to keep me from killing my readers. She’s killing my manuscript—not to mention, me. My poor book and I will starve to death.

But when my trimmed-down words move across the page, they now fit in their jeans and move without huffing and puffing. Perhaps even a slim little black dress is in the future. …

How about you? Have you ever been sent to a prose fat farm?

Or sent somebody else? 

      

         

   

"It's Not Quite There."

by Rick Barry

In response to a manuscript I once submitted to an agent, I received the following reply: "It's not quite there." The agent was polite. The note was even handwritten, which I appreciated. However, as I sat and reread those words, I wondered what my story needed to be "all the way there" instead of not quite there. The problem was, I'd already spent so many hours with my characters and their predicament that I could no longer view my own pages objectively.

After that experience, another writer requested that I take a look at part of a manuscript and give some frank feedback. (By the way, only frank feedback is helpful. Feedback that praises the writer when the quality is lacking actually hurts the writer by instilling false confidence and misleading him or her.) As I read the pages, I truly wanted to tell my acquaintance, "This is great. Keep up the good work!" Instead, the words that came to mind were "It's not quite there." And I understood what the agent meant about my own story.

You see, the draft I was reading simply lacked polish. At times the heroine did things that didn't make sense based on what the story revealed about her. She was also a bit of a cardboard cutout rather than coming across like a real person. For the most part, the grammar and punctuation were okay even if not stellar. Yet, sentence by sentence the story simply unfolded in a straightforward way from Point A to Point Z. There were no clever plays on words. No irony. No red herrings to keep the reader intrigued. The setting descriptions also lacked pizazz. Sure, there were descriptions of locale, so I knew where the heroine was. But those locations didn't come alive. There were sights and sounds, but little or no sense of smell, of taste, or touch.

In other words, as I proofed this manuscript, it certainly was complete as far solving the mystery and uniting the boy and girl. But was the tale polished to the point where a publisher would say, "We'll offer you a contract for this"? Regrettably, no. The story wasn't quite there.

With the input of a professional writing coach, I attacked my story with hammer and chisel. I knocked off rough portions I'd left in the story, injected fresh elements where needed, then grabbed sandpaper and started polishing. The end result is an improved manuscript that caught the eye of a literary agent. Now she is shopping that story to publishers.

What's my point? Try to scrutinize your own words with a professional eye, not with your author's eyes. Step back. Be objective. Compare your style, your phrasing, your everything to the writing of your favorite authors. When you can see why your story is "not quite there," you will have taken the first step toward improving it!

Rick Barry has freelanced hundreds of articles and short stories, had two novels published, and has more projects in the works.

Revision versus Editing (Part 2)

                                                       By Kelly Bridgewater

Last month, I suggested some blanket revision techniques to help the process of revising your final manuscript. This month, I want to help you with the Editing part of your final manuscript.

Editing means looking closely at the format and the grammatical errors in your manuscript. Now, I know, some of you will hate this, while others look forward to finding grammatical errors in anything. (I enjoy finding grammatical errors.)

-Make sure your manuscript has one-inch margins and written in 12 point font with Times New Roman.

-Double space your entire document.

-Header should be Last Name/ BOOK TITLE/ Word Count

-One space after every sentence.

-Past tense. Your manuscript major verbs should be in past tense.

-No head hopping. This means, don’t start a section of the chapter in the heroine’s head, but then skip into the hero’s head because he would have more emotion during a certain incident. Maybe reevaluate why the chapter should be in the heroine’s head if you believe the hero would have more of an emotional response. Switch the perspective of the chapter. Quick fix.

-Don’t use explaination points! Unless having someone yell in a direct dialogue. (This bothers literary agent, Chip MacGregor.See “What Drives an Editor Crazy” by Chip MacGregor, April 9, 2013)

-Use the correct format of the word: Your (possession: your car, your house, etc); You’re (Contraction: You are)

-Use the correct format of the word: There (a place: go over there, the house over there); Their (possession: their car, their house, etc); They’re (contraction: they are).

 -One of my biggest pet peeves that I remind my students over and over: Don’t rely on your spell checker and grammar checker. They don’t find everything. Plus, I have found the grammar checker wrong on more than one occasion.

-Print out your manuscript. If every first word is the same, then you need to revise the wording. My biggest problem is I usually start every paragraph with a dependent clause, such as Starting the car, Walking to the store. I try to go back and fix this.

-Change your weak verbs, such as, was, were to more active verbs like clinched, stoked, loved, etc….

Of course, there are many more suggestions to fix the appearance and words of your manuscript, these are just a couple of suggestions.

Please share any suggestions you have that work. I would love to learn different strategies to apply to my writing. 

Kelly Bridgewater holds a B.S. in English and a M.A. in Writing from Indiana State University on the completion of a creative thesis titled Fleeting Impressions, which consisted of six original short stories. She has been published in the Indiana State University Literary Journal, Allusions, with her stories titled “Moving On” and “Life Changing Second.” In fall 2011, she presented her essay, Northanger Abbey: Structurally a Gothic Novel, at the Midwestern American Society of 18^th Century Studies Conference. Kelly’s writing explores the ideas of good prevailing over evil in suspense. Kelly and her husband reside with their three boys and two dogs.