A. LaFaye's Blog: Word Wanderings Rest Stop - Posts Tagged "writing-advice"

If they can have two-ply TP why can't our details do double duty? There's a reason details show up in so many platitudes, they're essential in making writing vicarious. They're an essential ingredient in the cardinal rule of creative writing--"show don't tell" (which is often artfully broken, but that's a subject for another blog). My five finger fiction checklist for good details is

1. Be specific

A good book could be a mystery novel that had Chet gripping the page so hard, he tore a corner.

2. Be concrete

Eddie wasn't mad, he looked ready to grind his teeth down to the root.

3. Be sensory

It wasn't an annoying sound, Gayle's version of tickling the ivories felt more like cleaning your eas with a pocket knife.

4. Be partial

Wanda doesn't need to have a maroon four door sedan with an "I hug bombs" bumper sticker, a broken tail light and thirteen water stained parking tickets under the wiper blade. It's just a beater proclaiming Wanda hugged bombs from the bumper sticker and refused to head parking laws with the 13 parking tickets accumulating under her wiper.

5. Be original

Don't go for the ocean blue eyes, the emerald green grass, or the fluffy clouds, let the eyes remind you of the final quasar of light after you shut off the TV and the grass can be shade of your Algebra notebook.

And they're double duty details too, because the person staring into those blue eyes watches way too much tv and the kid avoiding cutting the grass is in Algebra.

The details you use should tell us more than one thing--they can establish character and setting or advance the plot while setting the scene. They need to do more than one thing at a time to earn their keep.

To learn more about details, pay attention to the use of details in the writer of your choice, better yet, compare how a poet uses them vs. a fiction writer or compare to fiction writers. Just dive right in, pick them apart and see what you can learn about creating details that do double duty.

Besides having prefixes that sound like the nicknames of twins--"precise" and "concise" are excellent writing tools once you learn how to wield them. Until then, they're often red letters in the margins of your work with comments like "Can you be more precise here? " or "Is this as concisely written as it could be?"

Or perhaps that just me.

Being precise and concise are cornerstones of good writing --saying just the right thing in the least amount of words possible is an excellent writing goal in most quarters. Interestingly enough, both words are drawn from a Latin word being "to cut" and we all know how easy it is to "cut back" our own writing. Right?

Well, here are two approaches that could work for you, but I'm of the opinion that there are no hard and fast rules for writing. It's all a matter of finding what works for the type of writer you are, but that may just bw because every rule that starts, "To be a real writer, you must..." ends with something I don't do.

So, here's some advice from an "unreal" writer who has a good deal of fun with word play.

Writing everything we want to say, then cutting back--the pruning approach--works for some. For more on doing a "Poetic Weed" please take a look at my blog on the subject, or wing it!

For this entry, I'm going to focus on "the pre" of precision and look at ways you can learn to increase you precision and brevity before you even start writing.

When you study the writing of others and conscientiously explore language, you sharpen your word smithing tools.

Precision requires knowing lots of words. For instance, what's the name of the groove between the nose and the upper lip? The philtrum. What's the difference between cleaning, mucking, and sluicing a gutter? Why does the difference matter as a writer?

My answer to question to two is: connotation, specificity, and sound.

"Cleaning" suggests a crispness and a sanitary goal with a spic and span result and has a clipped opening and a soft, elongated ending, in terms of sound.

"mucking" suggests sloppy, dirty, work to remove something disgusting, but with a dingy end result. A mucked out stall rarely looks pristine, where as a cleaned stall should. It also has a mmm of a beginning and "uck" in the middle and a drawn out end for musicality that reflects the messy, hard, ongoing work involved.

"sluicing," one of my favorite words, is quite active and organic and requires a lot of water pressure on your gutters and will probably make a living mess out of everything else, if you use this method. The sound quality is quite slurry with a c kicker in the middle.

Learning new words can be done by reading the dictionary--one of the reasons I love the print version. You can't easily happen upon a new word when looking it up on learnanewword.com (not a real site), but you can stumble upon a few beauts wondering through the old OED. That's how I learned "twit" has been around since about the 13th century and it's the same thing all that time. Not many words can say that.

But new words are best learned in context by reading and that's the best way to internalize being precise and concise, read the work of poets, reporters, fiction writers, and cartoonists you love to see just how they do it. Look up new words. Play with them--their meaning, their nuances, their sound, their application in house maintenance (I word I have yet to learn how to spell without assistance).

So go out there and find some new literary foot soldiers you might put to good use. If you pinpoint a fine precise word, please share it in the comment section. Or if you have a concise way to describe something complicated like an argument that allows us to see it in a new way, do share, please.

Getting in on the act as a writer is often about learning the tricks of the trade, or better yet, the ins and outs of the craft of writing. We've all seen plenty on character and plot development, but mention "active voice" and people are likely to shutter and have flashbacks of unfortunate grammar lessons in school. The good news is, this is no grammar lesson. Instead, it's a look at how you can use "voice" to individualize your style, make your writing more vicarious, and take control of the pacing of your work.

How can active voice do all that? Well, it can't alone. Like all aspects of writing it is a fusion of many aspects of craft.

Let's take a look.

To say, "Henry was angry as he traveled to work" is not in active voice. How can we fix that?

1. Work on the verbs --make them active
2. Work on the worldview (show us how Henry sees his world)
3. Up the specificity
4. Put us in the moment.

Henry felt like running over the parking meters, knocking them down like so many kings in a chess tournament as he careened down Fifth Avenue to get to work before his career fell into check mate.

Now, we see how Henry is traveling (careening/active verb), we know he's quite good at or a huge fan of chess from his figurative comparisons (worldview/character development), and we know he may well lose his job today (plot development through the use of specifics).These re-visions of the first sentence make the writing more distinctive (style), puts us in the moment, and gives a pull/momentum to the plot even thought it's longer (pacing).

Active voice brings us right into the world of the story or poem and we live vicariously in the world that's created.

So give it a try. Be active. And feel free to share your experiments in active voice in the comments of this blog.